TL;DR the author is afraid their programming skills will atrophy.
Fair enough, but it's a specific part of programming that will atrophy: the actual writing of the code, which as every experienced programmer will tell you, is only one of many parts to being a software developer.
Meanwhile, other skills will develop more strongly: architectural thinking, and also how do set up strong guardrails to ensure your code keeps working while the agent goes to town on it.
I've learned more about automated testing in the last few months than I did in the past decade and I finally see why TDD and especially e2e tests are such a big deal - something which I'm sure every person who has managed a project with lots of contributors would understand already, but I was never in that position before.
So yes, my skills at writing code probably are in decline, just as any skill I'm not actively using. But that's fine, my overall, collective level of skills is as high as it's ever been.
And whenever I send an agent of to do a big task that'll take 15 minutes or more, that's a great time to go and read the Playwright docs, or study some articles on code architecture. Or go and take a walk or do some stretching. Honestly, I find (mostly) not having to write the code itself liberating.
TL;DR the author is afraid their programming skills will atrophy.
Fair enough, but it's a specific part of programming that will atrophy: the actual writing of the code, which as every experienced programmer will tell you, is only one of many parts to being a software developer.
Meanwhile, other skills will develop more strongly: architectural thinking, and also how do set up strong guardrails to ensure your code keeps working while the agent goes to town on it.
I've learned more about automated testing in the last few months than I did in the past decade and I finally see why TDD and especially e2e tests are such a big deal - something which I'm sure every person who has managed a project with lots of contributors would understand already, but I was never in that position before.
So yes, my skills at writing code probably are in decline, just as any skill I'm not actively using. But that's fine, my overall, collective level of skills is as high as it's ever been.
And whenever I send an agent of to do a big task that'll take 15 minutes or more, that's a great time to go and read the Playwright docs, or study some articles on code architecture. Or go and take a walk or do some stretching. Honestly, I find (mostly) not having to write the code itself liberating.
The reason is the risk of cognitive atrophy.
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