Developer skill is obviously still essential — you can’t steer if you couldn’t drive. But what about developer energy? Before AI I could only code about 2 hours per day (actual time spent writing code) but with Claude Code I can easily code for 5 hours straight without breaking a sweat. It feels like riding an e-bike instead of a bicycle. AI genuinely feels like Steve Jobs analogy of a bicycle for the mind — it doesn’t replace me but now I can go much farther and faster.
You're right though, you need to be able to steer, but you don't necessarily need to be able to map read.
Case in point, I recently stood up my first project in supabase, cursor happily created the tables, secure RLS rules etc in a fraction of the time it would take me.
To stop it getting spaghetti I had to add a rule "I'm developing a first version - add everything to an SQL file that tears down and recreates everything cleanly".
This prevented hundreds of migration files being created, allowed me to retain and context, and every now and then ask "have you just made my database insecure", which 50:50 resulted in me learning something, or a "whoopsie, let me sort that".
If I wasn't aware of this then it's highly likely my project would be full of holes.
Maybe it still is, but ignorance is bliss (and 3 different LLMs can't be wrong can they?!)
Yeah this feels right. It helps with the bits I care about and definitely reduces friction there, but it also breaks through every wall when I’m off the happy path. I had to solve three layers of AWS bullshit yesterday to get back to training a model and if I’d had to solve them myself or bring in someone from my platform team I’d have ended up stopping short. I don’t really want to replace the parts of my job that I enjoy with AI, but I love having something to pick up the miserable bits when I’m stuck, confused, frustrated or bored. You’re absolutely right that this helps conserve energy.
