Ok Boomer

I just stumbled upon the umpteenth elegy of an Engineering Manager lamenting the loss of his mystical connection with the compiler, a reflection on how AI has shattered his sacred dopamine bubble that strikes me, frankly, as supine stupidity born of a flagrant contradiction. We are talking about someone who, by definition, lives in the exile of code, a manager who consciously chose to swap the mud of the terminal for meetings and Excel because management pays the bills that pure craftsmanship sometimes ignores, and who now resurfaces to preach sermons of stale purism about an activity he doesn't touch with a ten-foot pole anymore. It is an alarming lack of curiosity disguised as romantic nostalgia, because programming assisted by agents or copilots does not nullify the intellectual capacity of those who strive, it simply shifts the scale of the challenge to a higher plane. It is like the person who claims to love driving but despises the autonomous car without understanding that the system only removes the tedium of the daily traffic jam to return the pleasure of the routes that actually matter, allowing them to look at the landscape or reach destinations they were previously too lazy to pursue due to sheer mechanical exhaustion. You can always deactivate the autopilot and take back the wheel when the road gets interesting, just as you can keep programming for pleasure on your own terms, especially now that the economics of agents will soon force us back to the keyboard out of a simple matter of operating costs. There is something deeply infantile in reducing professional discourse to immediate sensory satisfaction, because work does not exist to feed our egos or our glands; it is done to produce value in exchange for money and most tasks in any industry are heavy, boring, and routine. Crying because a machine facilitates what used to be a mechanical effort is ridiculous, but there is a nuance that should truly keep us awake at night and that is the absolute technical fragility we are building while we delegate our thinking. I worry about our ability to drive to the hospital if the system fails, that prepper’s fear of knowing that learning to make fire with sticks is improbable but necessary when the gas runs out and the power grid goes down. If we depend so much on the car taking us that we forget the principles of combustion, we become dangerous and useless at the moment of truth, in that degraded mode of operation where AI hallucinates or the service vanishes. Professional utility today is measured in technical sovereignty, in the ability to audit every line of generated code without accepting it as dogma and in maintaining the skill necessary to rebuild the system from the foundations when the assistance shuts down. It is not about rejecting efficiency for a fake nostalgia, but about being the craftsman who uses the machine to scale but who still knows, with surgical precision, how to light the fire when winter arrives.

exit(0);