Thoughtless reliance on AI is a concern, but this post also hearkens back to a halcyon age that never existed. The places where developers use tab-complete now are exactly those where they would have previously copied from Stack Overflow, which suffers from the same issue of convenient but insecure code becoming widely adopted. If anything, LLMs are able to exercise some degree of quality control due to post-training improvements rather than sampling only from the middle of the training distribution, so the average suggestion should be better and less stale than the SO equivalent.

The primary danger here is a substitution effect in which developers who would previously have thought carefully about a given bit of code no longer do, because the AI takes care of it for them. Both anecdotally and in my own experience, developers can still discern between situations where they are the expert, in which case it is more efficient to rely on their own code than AI suggestions because it lowers the chances of error, and situations where they are operating outside their expertise or simply writing boilerplate, in which case AI is the optimal choice.

I challenge anyone to produce a well-documented study in which the average quality of a large codebase declines as the correlates of AI usage rise. Until I see that, I will continue to read "decline of care" posts as "kids these days."