[adamtaylor_13]

I'll point out that this presupposes that skill retention is necessary, as opposed to something like "taste" retention. I'm not arguing against this, just pointing out that it carries a supposition that may or may not be true.

I am not yet convinced that the skill loss is as bad as people make it out to be, nor am I convinced that "taste" degrades like "skill" does. After all, it's easy to teach someone a framework. It's very hard to communicate why something is not as functional or why the UX isn't as good as it could be.

All this to say, I believe these are valuable questions, but we should be careful what presuppositions we bring into the equation. My value has never been my ability to write code. It's been my ability to make people's problems elegantly go away. I do not believe AI is making that worse (yet).

Side-note: If it IS making my skills worse... I'll just sharpen them later. It's not like experimenting with AI for a few years is going to permanently disable me.

[xgulfie]

To your other point, skill retention is important for me, the person typing this, because we live in a society where if I don't develop my skills I become unemployed and die in a ditch

[xgulfie]

I anticipate that heavily using AI to do the dev work for you for a few years could very well be worse than just taking the years off, since you're training your brain that you can just reach for the AI

[sorentwo]

As a library maintainer, skill and taste are almost equally important. If I can’t recognize inefficiencies, difficult to maintain code, or generally unpleasant code smells, then people lose trust in my libraries/products and it’s no better off than some recently generated slop.

Years of production experience, wisdom, and using something in anger matters for both skill and taste.