When this AI era's devs grow older they'll complain the newer generation can't even vide code too.
“Kids these days don’t work as hard / know as much / value the important things” is as tired as it is universal.
In 2026, if you call yourself a developer and can't solve FizzBuzz without help, it's hard to argue that you know anything useful at all.
How? Fizzbuzz requires you to produce output; that's not functionality that CPU instructions provide.
You can call into existing functionality that handles it for you, but at that point what are you objecting to about the 'modern language'?
I’m not objecting to modern languages, I’m just saying that using them fails the “can write fizzbuzz with no help” test to only a slightly lesser degree than using AI tools. They’re a complex compile- and runtime environment that most developers don’t truly understand.
I'm genuinely curious how someone who never wrote a program in assembly, or debugged a program machine instruction by machine instruction, can really understand how software works. My working hypothesis is most of them don't and actually it's fine because they don't need it.
I don't think we're close to that time yet. Just like as a kid I was told to prove my work by hand even if I could do it in my head, and just like we learned how to do calculus without a calculator and then learned how to use the calculator to get the same result, I think we still need the software field to learn programming concepts independent of the use of AI to create code.
I don't think you can be a good "prompt engineer" for solid software in 2026 if you don't understand programming concepts and software architecture and flow.
Saying there have always been bad developers doesn't change that there's a higher ratio of them now.
No stats to back this up. Just interviews I've done recently and historically.