Perhaps we have arrived at a point today where all of the wisdom that longtime developers have gained is simply not needed anymore.

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A self-taught developer reflects on how he acquired software wisdom over decades through trial, error, and hands-on coding. He then questions whether that hard-won wisdom is still necessary in an era of agentic AI coding tools like Claude Code, which can build, review, and fix software autonomously. He confesses to shipping a working website without ever reading the generated code, and wonders what will feed the next generation of AI models if developers stop writing code themselves. He ultimately leans optimistic, suggesting future developers will operate at a higher level of abstraction, but acknowledges that the nature of developer judgment is fundamentally shifting.

Where will developer wisdom come from?

Real understanding comes from friction, and friction comes from problem solving.
If you cut out the problem solving, whatever you think you know is superficial.
Everything fails at some point, nothing is infallible, especially non-deterministic pattern interpolators. Everything works, until it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, who debugs the debugger? I’ve started <a href="http://confident-coding.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">confident-coding.com</a> to address this, because I think we’re going to need to constantly remind, educate and guide people on what it means to think carefully, think critically, and know how to find the rope that can pull you back above the surface when you’re drowning in the error codes.