From Tom Wojcik:

Here’s what keeps me up at night. By every metric on every dashboard, AI-assisted human development and human-assisted AI development is improving. More PRs shipped. More features delivered. Faster cycle times. The charts go up and to the right. But metrics don’t capture what’s happening underneath. The mental fatigue of reviewing code you didn’t write all day. The boredom of babysitting an agent instead of solving problems. The slow, invisible erosion of the hard skills that made you good at this job in the first place. You stop holding the architecture in your head because the agent handles it. You stop thinking through edge cases because the tests pass. You stop wanting to dig deep because it’s easier to prompt and approve. There’s no spark in you anymore.

I really enjoyed this article – I found myself nodding along throughout. I’m not an AI skeptic, but I do worry about what the next decade looks like for my career, and even more so for the people coming up behind me.

We’re drifting toward a future where the only engineers truly qualified to review AI generated code are the seniors who earned that judgment by writing bad code themselves — before AI existed to do it for them. When that generation retires, we’ll be left with teams peer-reviewing AI output they don’t deeply understand, using other AI tools to validate it. The blind leading the blind, but with great dashboards.

That doesn’t mean we can’t build remarkable things in this new world. But the quiet erosion of institutional knowledge means that even as the metrics trend upward, our collective human capital is quietly atrophying. We’re getting extraordinarily efficient at constructing systems that nobody will actually know how to fix … right up until an agent hallucinates its way into a 3 AM production outage and the on-call rotation just stares blankly.