A New AI Worry: Many Young Coders No Longer Know How Their Code Works

When interactive compilers and debuggers started to become more available, my father complained that junior devs would just make random changes to the code until it worked, rather than taking the time to understand it, as compared to when you had to wait for your punchcards to go through an overnight batch process.<p>It seems that lowering friction will always lower understanding, because industrious people will always try to get the most done, and inexperienced people will conflate getting the most done <i>now</i> with getting the most done in general.

Where did all of this trust come from?<p>When I first started hacking I had the expectation that every chunk of code I came across was broken in some way.<p>All of the software I relied upon was broken in some visible way. My Windows 95 installation would have multiple kernel panics per day. My Usenet reader would fail catastrophically when encountering non-ASCII text. My CD-ROM copies of games would freeze until I kicked the side of the computer which consistently worked.<p>I still see bugs everywhere nowadays, but they&#x27;re more hidden and, honestly more frustrating since they&#x27;re so opaque.

Writing code is easy compared to supporting, debugging and enhancing code. AI is much better at &quot;greenfield&quot; coding where you start from scratch, either on an entire app or a new feature. For anything non-trivial, it is terrible at debugging. At best it is a super-rubber-duck that is nice to talk to that might have a few words buried inside screenfuls of text that help a human realize what might be going wrong. We&#x27;re still in the honeymoon phase, where AI has only written new stuff and hasn&#x27;t been around long enough to have to support code with tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of LoC.

Turns out, knowing stuff is important when you try to do stuff that you claim to be an expert in, instead of outsourcing it to a crappy incorrect tutorial generator. Competitive edge for computer programmers going forward: knowing how computers work.

Personally I fail to see how this worry can be &#x27;new&#x27;.<p>A &#x27;new&#x27; transportation worry: many car drivers don&#x27;t know where to turn or even where they are heading without GPS.

A lot of companies were already outsourcing to companies with humans who don&#x27;t know how anything works.

Did young coders ever know how their code worked?

This is true of all levels of abstraction. The next question is: does this level of abstraction cost more than it’s worth.

Just ask the LLM to walk you through each line of code, create an explain the dependency graphs and in a relatively short period of time they’ll know exactly how their code works. Using Claude Code is quite useful for this - I use it on GitHub repositories I’m curious about.

And newspapers will have people walking into traffic, and cars will lead to the extinction of horses, and if horse manure keeps piling up at this rate, london will be buried in a decade.

wont matter once the agents code review the agent-generated code

Meh. Many coders don&#x27;t know how transistors work, and they can still be productive.<p>If many &quot;young coders&quot; don&#x27;t know how their code work but can solve more problems faster, is it really a problem?