AI, New Programmers, and the Rise of the Lazy Brain: A Veteran's Perspective

Introduction: A Generation Gap in Code

The software development world is undergoing a quiet transformation. For veterans of the field—those who've been writing code since the days of Stack Overflow marathons and hours of debugging with no help but documentation and grit—there's a noticeable shift in how newer developers approach the craft.

Many experienced engineers, with 10, 15, or even 20 years in tech, feel that the essence of true learning is fading. With the rise of AI assistants like ChatGPT, Copilot, and code-completing IDEs, a worrying trend has emerged: the "lazy brain" phenomenon.

The Power of Struggle: Why Veteran Developers Think Differently

Before AI, knowledge was earned through effort. Engineers:

• Googled endlessly, read forum posts, and pieced together broken code from different sources.
• Failed repeatedly, and learned why things broke before learning how to fix them.
• Understood infrastructure, built from scratch, debugged live servers, and knew what logs were telling them.
• Sought mastery, not just productivity.

This struggle formed a deep mental map of the systems they worked with. They didn't just know what code did, but why it worked.

The AI Age: Convenience Over Comprehension

AI today offers powerful shortcuts:

• Code is written for the developer, not by them.
• Solutions are delivered instantly, with no need to understand the underlying problem.
• Complex infrastructure is abstracted away by cloud tools and DevOps pipelines already set up.

While this accelerates delivery, it decouples learning from doing. New programmers may ship fast, but they often don't know how their systems truly work.

Learning vs. Copy-Pasting: What's Really Being Lost

In the old days, copying a snippet from Stack Overflow required understanding it. It was usually incomplete, or context-specific. You had to:

• Modify it for your case.
• Read documentation.
• Learn the language nuance.

Today, AI gives you context-perfect code, tailored to your input prompt. No need to learn. Just paste and run.

The result? Knowledge stays shallow.

Why We Still Need Senior Engineers

In this landscape, senior engineers are more important than ever:

• They know how to design resilient systems.
• They bring a deeper understanding of trade-offs, performance, and scalability.
• They mentor others—not just in what to write, but how to think.

AI can assist, but it cannot replace this depth.

What Needs to Change

New programmers are not lazy by nature—they're growing up in a different world. But we, the veterans, must:

• Teach them to go deeper.
• Explain the why behind the what.
• Encourage curiosity and critical thinking.
• Let them fail—because that's how we all truly learn.