Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. And all they’ll hear is “not failure, metrics great, ship faster, productive” and go against your advice because who cares about three months later, that’s next quarter, line must go up now. I also found this bit funny: I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me… I was proud of what I’d created. Well you didn’t create it, you said so yourself, not sure why you’d be proud, it’s almost like the conclusion should’ve been blindingly obvious right there.

The top comment on the article points that out. It’s an example of a far older phenomenon: Once you automate something, the corresponding skill set and experience atrophy. It’s a problem that predates LLMs by quite a bit. If the only experience gained is with the automated system, the skills are never acquired. I’ll have to find it but there’s a story about a modern fighter jet pilot not being able to handle a WWII era Lancaster bomber. They don’t know how to do the stuff that modern warplanes do automatically.

It’s more like the ancient phenomenon of spaghetti code. You can throw enough code at something until it works, but the moment you need to make a non-trivial change, you’re doomed. You might as well throw away the entire code base and start over. And if you want an exact parallel, I’ve said this from the beginning, but LLM coding at this point is the same as offshore coding was 20 years ago. You make a request, get a product that seems to work, but maintaining it, even by the same people who created it in the first place, is almost impossible.