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.

  • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
    11·
    3 hours ago

    the luddites were taylors and the like fighting against being replaced by machines for various reasons, including child labour, low wages for machine operators, and low quality product

    imo child labour laws are the way to solve the first problem: that’s, imo, unrelated to industrialisation/mechanisation

    lower wages are a product of lowering the barrier to entry: when anyone can do the same job, that is not a bad thing… it’s sad that an industry of people are pushed out of their profession, but we’d never say the same of coal: coal miners should realise that their industry is not going to exist any more, and retrain,… i have empathy for them, which is why we need to provide social programs to cover industries that get made redundant for any reason, but that’s not a reason to deny the rest of humanity the plenty that inevitably comes from industrialisation

    and low quality product is only really an issue at the very start of industrialisation… i guarantee these days we can make higher quality clothing in 100x the quantity than we can with artisans and hand stitching… machines always get better, but only if there’s effort put into using them

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
      3·
      3 hours ago

      Ok, so luddism was a grassroots movement so there obviously were different aspects and reasons for their actions, however for most luddites what they were protesting were not “being replaced by machines” (they themselves were mostly skilled laborers operating machines already) but the awful conditions for labor that were exacerbated when new types of machinery became available. They used strikes and capital destruction as two inter-reinforcing methods to strengthen their negotiation position with owners, not because they thought that destroying those machines would somehow save their old jobs and way of life.

      The luddites you are disagreeing with probably existed but they were a minority and they were not who made the movement notable and dangerous to the bourgeois.