We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.

New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.

Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.

The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.

We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.

Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.

Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.

Three rules:

  1. Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
  1. Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
  1. Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.

Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.

people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.

    • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      I’m the “good at exams” type, I find paper writing (or novel writing… 😢) unpleasantly tedious. If we lose the “good at structuring complex thoughts in a way that can be coherently decoded by other humans” types, the “good at exams” types will suffer. We need people who can write good papers and people who can recall diverse facts and arrange them into simple shapes quickly.

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
          5·
          22 hours ago

          we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago

          Education, and especially critical thinking, has been systematically gutted by conservative governments for at least 4 decades in the Western world. The goal is the absolute minimum knowledge and thinking skills (preferably without learning skills) necessary to complete the wage slavery tasks.

            • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
              2·
              21 hours ago

              Hard agree on Prussian-style education (which had similar goals of wage slavery when it was introduced). Unfortunately the pessimist in me thinks reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course, but it absolutely need to be a high priority when the time comes. Best time to plant a seed is twenty years ago…

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      3·
      21 hours ago

      I wasn’t great at exams, but I think if I re-did university today I’d still do much better because my personal learning style is best when I talk through the material with someone. Sitting in a lecture listening to someone monologue at me, reading a static textbook, those weren’t great. But with LLMs every student now has full-time access to a “live tutor” with infinite patience and no sense of social risk from asking it dumb questions. It’s absolutely my perfect learning environment.

      • dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        7 hours ago

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwZi58u1FjI - The Dragon Speech

        All the higher mammals learn by playing, by doing, by interacting. And indeed, the higher the mammal, the more of its life it spends in play to prepare itself for adulthood. So you can see, this active role of the mind is fundamental to the way we think. It’s wired into our brains.

        It’s a really great speech, and a lot of it is about the failures of our educational system.

    • reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net
      41·
      1 day ago

      Yeah I would have done much better in high school like this, though I don’t think AI will eliminate the poster projects unfortunately.