I would probably call artificial intelligence one of the greatest achievements of modern development and, at the same time, one of its biggest mistakes. Every time I open LinkedIn, I see countless new projects being built by absolute beginners. On one hand, this is amazing. On the other, I honestly think it’s dangerous.
It’s amazing because it clearly shows how fast development is evolving. New directions appear constantly. We used to say the industry changes every day. Now it probably changes every second. The amount of information and tools is insane. To keep up with everything, you either have to turn into a robot or accept that you will fall behind. That’s when impostor syndrome kicks in and you start feeling stupid.
When I was at university 11 years ago, whenever I needed to “cheat” a little during exams, the biggest technological achievement for me was Wolfram Alpha. It was like a super calculator. You could enter complex mathematical expressions and it would beautifully visualize the solution step by step. If I had ChatGPT back then, I would probably have felt like a genius. Learning would have been easier. Understanding things would have been faster.
Part of me is actually glad I belong to the generation that didn’t have knowledge perfectly served on a plate. We had to prepare the meal ourselves. We had to learn how to cook it. We had to dive deep into the process. That struggle shaped my engineering skills.
This reminds me of a quote from Georgian writer Guram Dochanashvili. When asked whether he preferred books or movies, he said:
“Movies please the eyes, books train the mind.”
That perfectly describes the difference between manual research and ready-made answers. When you read a book, you think. When you watch a movie, everything is delivered to you beautifully and effortlessly, shaped by someone else’s imagination.
Even back then, Stack Overflow copy-paste jokes already existed. But compared to what AI tools do today, that era feels almost funny. You still had to dig through old forums from 1999, search manually, read deeply, and learn.
The new generation of engineers has everything served on a plate. I remember my mentor Archil always telling me: “There are no shortcuts. Everything takes time, and that time only comes through hard work.” He was absolutely right. Yet here we are in a paradox there are kids who started development in the AI era and took the shortcut path from day one.
At a conference, one speaker said something that stuck with me:
“I don’t know what will happen in five years. I don’t know what kind of generation we will have. We don’t know where development is heading.”
That feels true. In five years, we might have a generation where almost everyone has touched development, but very few truly understand the fundamentals. That could become a disaster. It might even create more work because someone will need to fix all the mistakes.
I’m reminded of the COBOL situation during COVID in 2020. US governors were literally going live on TV begging for COBOL developers. Think about it will a generation raised on React suddenly pick up a language used in ATMs in the 1970s? Of course not. That kind of work requires a different kind of love.
I honestly believe the AI generation will never fall in love with development the same way the pre-AI generation did. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man, but I truly believe what I’m saying.
Another example comes from chess. I played chess semi-professionally as a child. Before computers entered chess, the game was radically different the style, the thinking, the move sequences. Today’s top players belong to the computer chess generation. Sometimes I watch live matches and I genuinely cannot understand what they’re doing. I spent years of my childhood playing chess, yet their moves feel alien. Before 2000, I could predict most moves from classic players. Now I often can’t even recognize the logic.
This is exactly what AI is doing to development. It is pushing it in a completely different direction.
There’s also something sad about this. For many people, development is not just a job it is a hobby, entertainment, an escape. Many of my friends, including myself, deeply miss the days of late-night coding and endless research. Chatbots and CLI tools have made developers lazy. Whether we like it or not, the human brain will always choose the easier path if it exists.
I don’t know what the endgame of AI in development is. But one thing is clear: the people who will succeed are those who go deeper and use AI to learn, not those who use it to deliver ready-made solutions just to make their manager happy.
P.S: I got so frustrated that I disabled AI assistants in my IDE, turned off autocomplete, disabled MCP servers, cancelled my ChatGPT subscription, and even turned off GitHub Copilot. I want to struggle again. I want to make things harder and feel the same way I did 15 years ago when I started programming.
Thank you if you read this until the end, and sorry for taking your time. Sometimes I just need to share my thoughts publicly.