I think AI is quietly creating a dangerous generation of software engineers. And nobody is talking enough about it. A lot of developers today can build things faster than ever before. But fewer developers actually understand what they are building. That’s the scary part. I recently noticed something while talking to students and engineers. People can now generate: 0. React components 1. APIs 2. backend architecture 3. SQL queries 4. Docker configs …within seconds. But the moment something breaks unexpectedly, many get completely stuck. Because debugging requires understanding. And understanding takes struggle. Earlier, when we used to build things manually, we would suffer through: 0. weird errors 1. broken deployments 2. dependency hell 3. state management bugs 4. performance bottlenecks At that time it felt painful. But that pain was actually building engineering intuition. AI removes a lot of friction. Which is amazing. But it can also remove the learning. And I think this is where the gap between “developers” and “engineers” will become very visible over the next few years. The developers who survive AI won’t be the ones who can generate code fastest. It will be the ones who can: 0. think deeply 1. debug systems 2. make engineering decisions 3. understand tradeoffs 4. simplify complexity Code generation is becoming cheap. Judgement is becoming expensive. That’s probably the biggest shift happening in software engineering right now.