We're about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn't use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We're doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody's asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They're required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can't take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They've become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won't ship the fastest. They'll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn't make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
This is kind of like the "you won't have a calculator with you all the time" argument by your 8th grade math teacher in 2003, except instead of making yourself dependent on a little solar powered device (that you could have with you all the time if you really wanted to, even before smartphones) you're becoming dependent on a subscription service offered by a trillion dollar company that can increase the price tenfold at will, or cut you from the platform entirely, stripping you of all your professional expertise at once.
That will have to increase the price ten fold to stop bleeding billions of dollars every month.
The American taxpayers will save them, whether they want to or not.
You can't bail them out, they will still be losing money. It's not like banks.
The play now seems to be that they will offload the bags on retirement funds and US 401k accounts. The ECB already issued a warning because of this.
I'm curious if the repeated bailouts will cause an adverse selection effect - the people getting bailed out gradually become the last dollar users.