By skyforbes 
📧 Contact: [email protected]
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lpuello3
🌐 Medium Blog: medium.com/@luispuello8
The Illusion of “New Laziness”
There’s a familiar complaint floating around the tech world right now:
“New developers can’t code without AI.”
It’s a catchy critique but it’s also selective memory.
Because if we’re being honest, Stack Overflow was our ChatGPT.
We just romanticize it now because it required a few more clicks.
Back then, we copy-pasted answers too. We leaned on other people’s solutions. We didn’t always understand what we were implementing — we just hoped it worked. The difference is that AI makes that process faster, not different.
So maybe the issue isn’t that AI is dumbing down developers.
Maybe it’s that human culture has always preferred convenience over comprehension.
Every Generation Finds Its Shortcut
Let’s go back in time.
There was a moment when people said IDEs were “cheating.” Then Google searches were “cheating.” Then Stack Overflow was “cheating.” Now, ChatGPT is.
Each new tool doesn’t change human nature it reveals it.
We’ve always wanted to skip the boring parts, to get to the results faster. Efficiency feels like progress, even when it quietly erodes depth.
If ChatGPT existed in 2010, let’s not kid ourselves we’d all have used it.
We’d have loved it. We’d have justified it as “being productive,” just like developers today do.
The tools change.
The impulse stays the same.
The Cultural Erosion of Learning
The deeper issue isn’t AI it’s the culture we’ve built around it.
Modern tech culture celebrates speed, output, and shipping fast.
We reward deliverables, not understanding. Deadlines over depth. Results over reasoning.
In that environment, AI isn’t the villain it’s the perfect product.
It fits neatly into a system that already values acceleration over reflection.
Meanwhile, mentorship has quietly evaporated.
Junior developers rarely get the kind of one-on-one guidance that teaches not just what works, but why. In cybersecurity, it’s the same story entry-level analysts are handed automation tools, not frameworks for thinking.
The outcome?
A generation of developers who can ship code, but not explain code.
A workforce that can fix symptoms but not diagnose systems.
If We’re Honest, Stack Overflow Wasn’t That Different
Let’s be brutally honest.
Stack Overflow was just a slower version of ChatGPT.
You’d copy an error, paste it into Google, scan through forum answers, find a snippet that looked right, and paste it into your code.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it broke everything.
But you weren’t necessarily learning more you were just struggling longer.
That friction felt like learning because it was hard, but friction isn’t the same as understanding.
The real learning came when you stayed curious when you read through discussions, compared answers, or followed a thread to its root.
AI can’t stop you from doing that. But culture can.
Companies Aren’t Helping
There’s also a structural problem: companies have stopped nurturing juniors.
Startups want “self-starters” who can “figure it out with AI.”
Large companies have cut back on mentorship because AI tools look like a cheap replacement for human training.
The message is subtle but clear: Don’t ask questions. Just ship.
When that becomes the norm, curiosity becomes a liability.
Nobody wants to slow down the sprint to think deeply about a system design problem when there’s an AI assistant whispering, “Here’s a quick fix.”
We’re not just outsourcing coding to machines we’re outsourcing critical thinking.
AI Isn’t Destroying the Foundation We Are
AI isn’t inherently corrosive.
What’s corrosive is our willingness to let it replace the very processes that built this industry: curiosity, community, and craftsmanship.
Software development was never just about code.
It was about learning how to think how to debug, reason, and solve creatively.
The foundation of technology was built on the struggle to understand systems deeply. That’s what gave rise to open-source movements, peer learning, and shared intellectual progress.
When we use AI purely as a crutch, we lose the friction that shaped our cognitive resilience.
But when we use it as a collaborator a tool to question, test, and accelerate our reasoning we keep that foundation alive.
Maybe This Isn’t About AI At All
Maybe the real question isn’t “Is AI making us worse developers?”
Maybe it’s “What kind of learning culture are we cultivating?”
Because the truth is, AI reflects us.
If we build a culture that values shortcuts, AI will give us shortcuts.
If we build one that values understanding, AI will amplify that too.
So no AI didn’t eliminate our foundation.
We’re doing that ourselves, every time we celebrate speed over understanding.
Final Thought: Remember Why We Built Things
We built AI to make our lives easier.
But the irony is, the struggle the debugging, the late-night problem-solving, the deep “aha” moments that’s what made us who we are.
Stack Overflow was our ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is their Stack Overflow.
And in 10 years, there’ll be something new and someone new lamenting, “Developers these days don’t learn the hard way.”
It’s not new. It’s human.
The question is: will we finally learn from that?
External Resource
If you’re interested in how learning culture evolves with automation, check out this research from the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence:
https://cci.mit.edu
The future of coding and culture isn’t about whether we use AI.
It’s about whether we still care to understand why things work.