Are we losing touch with reality?

A comment on Hacker News is making me question if the industry is losing its grip on reality, and what it means to say you are skilled in a profession

I was scrolling Hacker News over the weekend when a comment stopped me dead in my tracks. For a moment I stared at it in disbelief, not knowing if what I am reading is from someone who’s “trollcraft” is epic, or if it was sincere.

The comment was made on a post about how AI coding assistants are getting lots of people, who used to be engineers but have moved into other positions, back into coding.

As you can imagine the comment section was lively and full of opinions. Our industry can be labelled many things but lacking in opinions is not one of them.

The comment in questions was making the claim that, and I quote

“If I tell a chef how to prepare a meal I want, and they prepare it, then I have cooked the meal”.

I was simply dumbstruck reading that. We seem to have slowly been losing our grip on reality.

We all rely on technology to get our work done faster and more efficiently. Nothing wrong with that. But surely we must also realise that if you cannot do the work without AI then you don’t actually know how to do the work.

If we take that comment to its extreme then a non-technical manager, who has told an engineering team what to build, can consider themselves an engineer. The same as anyone that ordered a meal at McDonald’s would be able to call themself a chef or cook.

You might think I am being extreme here but I have seen this shift happen over the last two and a half years. True mastery and skill is being devalued at an alarming rate. Yes AI tooling is extremely useful in certain circumstances, but to wield it wisely you need the skill to know when it is busy messing up.

I don’t blame the commenter, we have been collectively bombarded with this messaging since AI coding tools have hit the industry. However, I cannot help but wonder if we are losing our grip on what skill and mastery mean?