One quick browse on the interwebs, and you’ll see two opposing narratives colliding head-on:
“AI will replace developers completely!”
“AI is creating the worst generation of developers we’ve ever seen!”
I’ve been talking to a couple of dev friends of mine as well on this topic, as I am sure you are as well. And the common consensus among folks who understand the capability of AI tools is:
If you’re a good dev -
AI does certainly help you get stuff done faster. But at the risk of creating errors, and making you complacent - i.e have to use it carefully, or you’ll lose your edge.
If you’re a Junior Dev (New to Dev) -
You should try to avoid using AI tools as much as possible till you have the fundamentals clear on what skillset you are learning.
That being said however, there is a lot of ‘gray area’ to these statements.
<ul>
<li>When can one consider their fundamentals are good?</li>
<li>Isn’t the best use case for AI is quickly learning new things?</li>
<li>Where do we draw the line between too much AI vs auto complete is fine?</li>
</ul>
This coupled with the fact, that I have personally seen that Juniors these days are relying ‘too much’ on AI assist tools and it is clear that the quality of code has gone downhill in my industry (Services and Delivery).
I feel like we are at the tipping point of something interesting.
That socioeconomic principle we’ve all heard -
“the rich get richer, the poor get poorer”
is now playing out in technical skills development.
The devs, who were already good at the fundamentals, peak at what they do, AI is making them more enhanced so to say. Every day, more and more devs are being equipped with the capability to turn into Product devs.
Indie dev is on the rise more than ever before, and generally speaking, it does feel like, good devs are ‘richer’ with their abilities.
And the devs who are still new to the field and don’t understand the importance of best practices, clean code, DRY, refactoring etc - are relying on AI to figure that stuff out for them - leaving them ‘poorer’ as a result.
I believe AI isn’t going anywhere any time soon. And it will become an ‘expected’ feature of basically every App down the road.
But at the same time, I do wonder, if someone is keeping track of how complacent low skilled labor is becoming because of AI.
If you’re reading this, the key takeaway for you should be to stick to fundamentals.
It is easier than ever to enter a field,
Hence it is harder than ever to compete out of the gate,
But in the long run -
Standing on principles will always beat standing on AI-generated shortcuts when things inevitably break.
P.S Enjoy an AI generated image, pretty sure none’s app will break coz of it :D

Knowledge by Execution - Breaking Down Tech for the Mango Man (Aam Aadmi/Regular Person) - https://www.sknexus.org/

SK NEXUS

AI tools are transforming the developer landscape, making skilled developers more efficient while potentially hampering the growth of junior developers who may rely too heavily on these tools. Mastery of fundamentals is crucial for long-term success in the field, as solely depending on AI-generated solutions can lead to complacency and lower quality work.

Rich Get Richer, Poor Get Poorer - Dev Edition

Fancy YouTubers are the main source of this misleading information. To attract views, they show exaggerated aspects of AI with catchy titles like, ‘You can build a whole app with AI—no need to learn to code.’ And then, the app they made is just a TODO app 🤣.&quot;

AI is a powerful tool—reshaping industries, sparking innovation, and challenging us to think about the future in new ways. It’s exciting, but it also comes with responsibility.
nice read !!

I agree. Just today I tried to find out something about full text search indices in PostgreSQL. The tutorials I found googling were unsatisfying.
When I asked Claude, it produced a solution that was so insanely complicated and contrived that I immediately dismissed it, based on the info I got from the tutorials. A less experienced developer may have just gone with it.

This is a really good take, i’ll be using this term in my upcoming discussions 😂😂
I feel like using AI is fine as long as it’s not doing the thinking for you
I know a couple of friends who’s work week consists of telling AI to “write an endpoint that does this and that” and they just roll with it with minimal adjustment, they gain some benefit from this because it seems that the projects they work on are pretty simple for numerous clients
Another friend of mine is a cracker developer all around, he even used to write malware just to learn C back in the day, this guy uses AI as more or less of an advanced autocomplete, he makes all the decisions and designs everything and writes the code, but relies on Copilot to autocomplete some parts every now and again but never to write something from scratch.
the cracked get richer and the juniors get poorer

Totally agree with your points, especially how AI is widening the gap. Good devs are leveling up, while others risk becoming too reliant on AI.
That said, I believe we’re moving toward a future where traditional fundamentals may become less relevant. As AI continues to evolve, we’ll write less code by hand, shifting focus from implementation to architecture, prompting, and validating AI output.
The fundamentals won’t disappear, they’ll just change. Knowing how to guide and reason about systems will matter more than syntax. So while blind reliance on AI is risky now, the real skill long-term will be how well you direct AI, not how well you code line-by-line.