AI coding isn't the threat—outsourcing understanding is

Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence

The author argues both sides of the AI coding debate miss the point. The real risk isn't letting AI write code—it's letting it take over the thinking. Delegating debugging and design decisions creates an illusion of competence that collapses when the machine can't help. This is especially dangerous for juniors who may never build the mental models that come from struggling through hard problems.

Why it matters: A sharply argued personal essay that reframes the AI-coding debate from code quality to a programmer's mental model of the system. The argument is grounded in everyday experience, not abstraction. Score capped because it's a pure opinion piece with no data or experiments, and ...