AI can delay learned foundations becuase it gives you really cool stuff to start with and it doesn't break until you reach a certain level of complexity. But once you hit that level of complexity it can feel daunting to then have to learn foundational things. It's like looking down a mountain and realizing how far up you went without any experience.

I like thinking of it like you have two mountain climbers. One actually has practiced on a small cliff first, then a medium mountain then went for everest. The other person decided to buy a jetpack that takes up the mountain. They get too ambitious and decide to tey mt. everest and half way through he runs out of fuel. He looks up and realizes he's never actually climbed a day in his life and realizes his incompetence. The other person can use the jetpack just the same, but if it fails he can still default to his skill. And because he's well versed in climbing he can climb the certain parts that are easy and then use the jetpack when he needs. It's selective and used with intention. Not as a crutch.

People often think devs are just being bitter or coping because AI will replace them. But honestly our brains aren't changing any time soon. There's no substitute to repetition, reading, adapting, memorizing, and doing thousands of problems and debugging. We don't know everything about the brain, but we do know you need to pick difficult problems, practice, make mistakes, fix them, and then rinse and repeat for years to get good at things. This applies to any field. Imagine people skipping that step entirely. Funny thing is we've already had that before. Remember when people would get stuck in an endless loop of video tutorials (called "tutorial hell") because the mental load required to open a video and follow along isn't as much or as scary as opening up the terminal and trying to create a project yourself from scratch. AI is that new form of hand holding. AI increases access to knowledge but no one except you can make you consume that knowledge. We have libraries but people still refuse to learn. We have professors that are experts in every field but people still revuse to learn. No we have AI and guess what, people will still refuse to learn. It's more comforting to give a prompt to Ai and then get an output and say -> "I made this" instead of actually learning. Learning is hard, it makes you feel insecure, it challenges you and makes you feel stupid and tired. But that's fine. AI will create a bunch of people that are always stuck in that beginner phase just like video tutorial hell did. And they won't be able to solve bigger and better problems with/without AI becuase they can't even comprehend those problems or know they exist to begin with. Who will prompt an AI better, the engineer who has 10 years of experience, or the beginner with vague prompts that barely even knows what they want. Give a baby AI and see what it does. You can produce better input if you have more experience. But people think we are just coping when we say that. But a doctor can use AI better for medical reasons, and a dev can use AI better to code.