Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.
If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).
We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.
Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.
For example, I never realized how much there is to learn about something as simple as a bolt. To me, it was just a cylinder with helical grooves. Then I watched the video “Life of Bolts” on YouTube and was amazed by the number of steps and processes required to manufacture a high-precision, high-performance bolt for a Formula 1 car. Another eye-opening moment was watching “Origin of Precision.” It completely changed the way I look at everyday objects.
Once I started digging deeper into bolts, I discovered how many fields are connected to making them: materials science, process engineering, manufacturing engineering, metrology, precision engineering, and more. I have even come across PhD theses focused on bolts, O-rings, and seals. One time I found a technical paper on O-ring modeling from NASA’s technical server, and it was full of complex partial differential equations. It honestly surprised me how much knowledge and effort go into designing and producing things that seem so simple.
It makes me realize that the biggest bottleneck in learning anything deeply is mathematics. At the same time, you also need some philosophical grounding to ask the right questions, along with the willingness to learn and apply knowledge in the real world.
YouTube is an amazing place to learn new skills and if you want to learn how professionals deploy code, a peek behind the AWS curtain can be very helpful even if it is too expensive for your toy website.
