Don't let your skills atrophy

It is an uncertain time for software development at the moment. A lot of companies are no longer hiring junior developers while those still employed are spending all their time prompting AI instead of writing code by hand. Even with AI writing most of the code these days, that shouldn't mean you stop learning and understanding what your code is doing. The less time you spend in your codebase the more distant you become from it. The speed that you gain from not having to write the code is soon lost when a critical bug comes in, and you don't understand the code or know where to look. In the past, I could see a stacktrace from a bug in production and know exactly where the problem was and how to fix it. I have had cases where the time between a critical error occurring on production and a fix being released is a low as 20 mins. That is only possible when you truly understand the code, and it is written in a maintainable way. Yes maybe an AI agent could find the bug and fix it faster,…

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