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.

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
    6·
    8 hours ago

    No, I think technology should serve the people, not the rich people who own the means of production. I suggest you actually read the article I linked.

    • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      Oh, I have read it.

      Luddites were strongly motivated by loss of jobs. The article refers to this, and you can find plenty of examples of pamphlets and letters about this:

      image

      http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/SpinningWeb/week8d.html (“We know that it have been mentioned to our great men and Ministers in Parliament by them that have Factorys how many poor they employ, forgetting at the same time how many more they would employ were they to have it done by hand as they used to do.”)

      You can characterise this as “technology should serve the common man, not the rich people” through a modern lens of class struggle, but the clear motivation at the time was simply loss of employment and the problems that brought. If they had a more complex understanding like I think you’re voicing, I think you would see their ire directed elsewhere rather than destroying the machines.