You Live in an Illusion. Get over It
The article discusses the resistance of senior developers to AI-generated code, highlighting a historical pattern of reluctance towards new abstraction layers in programming. It argues that developers often operate under an illusion of understanding, believing they comprehend the code they work with, when in reality they rely on stable abstractions. The author suggests that this transition to AI-generated code is another step in the evolution of programming, where control can shift to new layers without losing essential functionality.
- ▪Senior engineers are hesitant to adopt AI-generated code due to a perceived lack of understanding.
- ▪Historically, developers have resisted new abstraction layers, only to later accept them as standard.
- ▪The article references a paper that discusses the illusion of understanding in scientific work, which parallels the experiences of developers.
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CTO Coaching CTO CoachingStephan Schmidt - May 26, 2026You Already Live in an Illusion. Get Over It.AI is the next absorption event, and the thing being absorbed is codeTL;DR: Senior engineers refuse AI-generated code because they cannot ship code they do not understand. But they never understood the code -- not the bytecode, not the query planner, not the SIMD instruction the compiler folds their loop into. They trusted stable abstractions, not understanding. Every layer of our stack absorbed the one below it: assembly into C, malloc into garbage collection, threads into async runtimes. AI codegen is the next absorption event, and code is the thing being absorbed. The failure modes that look catastrophic today will stabilize the way GC pauses did.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Amazing CTO.
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