Comment by bitwize

My father, who was a mechanical engineer, has noted an instance of "brainrot" occurring with younger engineers: they are instructed in how to design parts, but not how to machine them, so they lack physical intuition about what kind of finish and tolerance is appropriate for a given part. This isn't really the fault of the young engineers, nor is it the fault of CAD which is still mainly a more efficient, more expensive draftsman's pencil, just a consequence of the fact that engineering curricula have largely optimized away the craftsmanship aspects of actually building things, leaving mechanical design work to be a mainly theoretical exercise.

With AI-assisted development we are at risk of something similar happening; the promise of LLM-based programming assistance is the ability to very rapidly knock together something according to a high-level specification without developing the craftsman's "feel" for how it actually runs. The scope of what's passed on in the discipline is narrowing, and people are forgetting essential skills they used to rely on in order to craft quality software.