The machine writes code now. You describe what you want, it delivers. They call it vibe coding — you set the direction, AI handles the syntax.

It works. Remarkably well.

But something gets lost when we stop touching the code ourselves.

The Craft Behind the Output

A carpenter who only operates a CNC machine eventually forgets how wood feels under a hand plane. The grain, the resistance, the moment when the blade catches just right.

Programming has texture too. The rhythm of refactoring. The satisfaction of deleting code that no longer serves. The quiet clarity when a complex problem reduces to something simple.

AI doesn’t feel this. It generates. It doesn’t craft.

Understanding vs. Accepting

When you write code yourself, you understand why it works. When AI writes it, you accept that it works.

// You wrote this — you know why
if ($user->hasPermission($resource)) {
    return $this->authorize($user, $resource);
}

// AI wrote this — you hope it's right
return $this->authorizationService
    ->checkPermissionWithFallback($user, $resource, $defaultPolicy);

Both may function. Only one lives in your mind.

The danger isn’t that AI code fails. It’s that we lose the ability to know when it should.

Intention Over Generation

Minimalism teaches us that every element must justify its existence. Every line, every function, every abstraction.

AI generates abundantly. It doesn’t know restraint. It doesn’t ask “is this necessary?” — it asks “does this satisfy the prompt?”

The human touch is curation. It’s the willingness to delete what the machine gave you. To simplify what it complicated. To say “less” when the tool offers “more.”

The Irreplaceable

What remains uniquely human:

  • Judgment — knowing when the correct solution is wrong for the context
  • Taste — recognizing elegance that no metric captures
  • Responsibility — owning code you didn’t write but chose to ship
  • Empathy — understanding the human who will read this at 3am during an outage

AI assists. Humans decide.

The Great Inversion

Something strange is happening in our industry.

Senior developers are thriving. They know what to ask for. They recognize when the output is wrong. They’ve built the mental models over years of touching code directly. AI amplifies their experience.

Juniors? I wouldn’t want to be in their skin right now.

How do you build intuition when the machine handles the struggle? How do you learn debugging when you never wrote the bug? How do you develop taste when you’ve never felt the pain of bad decisions?

The traditional path — write bad code, learn why it’s bad, write better code — is being shortcut. And shortcuts in learning rarely lead anywhere good.

Seniors are being promoted. They’re 10x now, maybe 100x. The gap widens.

Juniors are being skipped. Not hired. Or worse — hired and never developed.

The cruelty is subtle: AI makes juniors feel productive while robbing them of growth. The code ships. The understanding doesn’t.

Finding Balance

The answer isn’t to reject the tools. That’s nostalgia disguised as principle.

The answer is intentionality.

Use AI to handle the mechanical. Reserve your attention for the meaningful. Write the critical paths yourself. Understand the architecture even when you didn’t type it. Question everything the machine produces.

Stay close enough to the code that you still feel its texture.

The Quiet Practice

Every morning, before the AI assists, write something by hand. Ten lines. Twenty. Doesn’t matter.

Feel the syntax. Make the decisions. Remember why you learned this craft.

The machine will always be there when you need it. But the understanding — that requires practice. That requires presence. That requires the human touch.

The tools change. The craft remains.