This feels even more relevant with AI-assisted coding. Generating code is getting cheaper; the bottleneck is increasingly understanding and validating what already exists.
I think that for reading and understanding code you first need to have experience writing it and making mistakes. Are we bound to have a generation of coders that have never written any code at all?
True. Reading code needs some experience in how coding actually works. I feel confident enough to read code in programming languages I've never coded in as long as they are imperative because the the pattern will be similar so that an abstract static analysis is possible.
I don't mind the usage of AI agents but review the code, understand and improve it. Every other prompt I don't even need to run the code to see that it won't work and I'm tired of the "oh sorry, you're right! Here's a fixed version" excuses.
I've already noticed, how AI usage makes people not think anymore. There's a problem? Ask the AI. Run whatever the AI returns. It declares solutions as dangerous and explains why but I saw enough people solving their problems with --force until it caused real damage or failed.
And the explanation is filling with indignation: "Just use --force" - "why?" - "It does not work otherwise" - "why?" - "I don't know". It was a npm telling, it cannot resolve the dependency tree anymore.