> There's nothing to learn with AI

You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.

Eh, there’s definitely some value in understanding for yourself via experience which models are actually good for which use cases. The benchmarks are unreliable imo, and as I’ve interviewed developers who don’t really use AI, they say things like how they don’t think the (free versions of) copilot or ChatGPT (requests routed to their cheapest models) don’t seem very good. Totally out of touch with the capabilities of the leading models and harnesses.

I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.

Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.

If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.

Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.