Without AI, In Our Time

Our parents walked tens of kilometers to school. Uphill both ways, probably no shoes, maybe over a flooded river with the odd crocodile in it. Who knows. The point was never the distance — it was having walked it, on foot. We’re next: “back in my day, we did X without AI.”

Take engineering, we read the whole stack trace, wrote the regex by hand and got it wrong four times, sat with a bug for three hours with nothing but a 2009 forum post and spite. We learned the language by typing it out, not by casting prompt spells for an idea we didn’t quite understand. One day a younger engineer might hear that and ask, “you read the docs? by choice?” — the same look we gave our parents. And like them, we’ll be half exaggerating.

Compilers, garbage collection, autocomplete — every abstraction before this one took away busywork, and good riddance. But not all work is busywork. There’s the other kind, where you don’t understand something and have to think for yourself, deeply, with nothing to lean on. AI is different because it will think for you, if you let it. And that’s the part that sticks: years later, the ground you covered on your own is what lets you stare at a cost graph going vertical and know where to look. Sitting with something you don’t understand until you do — that’s the skill that carries.

AI is pure upside once you know the route, and a fast way to nowhere when you don’t. That’s the gap it widens. The first draft may feel like 10x. But the day the climb gets steep, some of you will be better prepared than others, who may be lost on a road they never walked.