Every time the tools get better, someone worries that the next generation won't really understand the work

I’ve heard that worry three times now. Once about my generation.

When I started in the late nineties, there was nothing between you and the structure. HTML and XML read by hand, view source as the classroom. You understood the page because you had to. There was no layer doing it for you.

That was also around the time I made the jump from functional to object-oriented thinking - mostly by taking things apart until the structure started to make sense.

Then the level rose. Components, frameworks, APIs. We stopped building everything ourselves and started building with things other people had made. And the generation before us worried: they won’t understand what’s underneath.

They were half right. We didn’t - not the way they did. But we still learned the hard way, just in different places.

I once integrated with a mainframe interface that only spoke in whole numbers. So we multiplied on the way in and divided on the way out. Every amount in the system was dancing around a design decision made decades earlier, in code we would never get to see.

Our code was right. Their system worked as intended. The interface between them was the trap.

That’s where our judgment got built. Not on the level below us - on the one we actually worked at.

Now the level is rising again. Agents do the building, and we specify, review and own the result. And the worry is back, word for word: how will the next generation learn if the machine does the work?

Someone challenged me on this recently, and he had a point. You don’t learn much from reading someone else’s bad code. You learn from breaking your own things and paying for it. That part doesn’t change.

But having lived through two of these shifts, I think the pattern holds: the blood doesn’t disappear when the level rises. It just moves. The next generation will bleed in the specifications, the architecture, the assumptions an agent never surfaced. That’s where their judgment will get built.

I’m a builder. The levels have changed three times under me. The job never did: finish the thing, own the result, know where it bleeds.