Ravindran Navaneethan

AI has completely changed what I loved about software engineering. Earlier, you’d sit with a problem, understand it deeply, write the code, break it, debug it, and eventually own the solution. Now so much of engineering feels like staring at a screen waiting for an agent to finish. And the worst part isn’t even that AI writes code. It’s that we’re slowly losing ownership of the codebase. AI generates thousands of lines we barely read. The code becomes a black box. Then something breaks, and suddenly you’re expected to debug a system you never really understood in the first place. At the same time, constantly delegating thinking to agents feels like it’s destroying our attention span and our ability to patiently read, reason about, and understand code. Maybe we’re shipping faster. But sometimes it genuinely feels like we’re becoming worse engineers while our codebases become harder to understand.