"I started to lose my ability to code"

General comments below.

The article says: "Already, it feels like there’s not much left for a human teacher to contribute, they believed". I also got a question over IM on whether it is possible to learn programming without a live teacher, using AI instead. I answered "no", and I stand by this "no". A live teacher chooses what to teach and in which order. A live teacher can insist on not skipping some boring but important topic and not advancing further until something is mastered, and AI currently can't do that.

On the other hand, avoiding AI completely is counterproductive. I do use AI, including for contributions to projects that allow this, but I do review everything that AI writes. So, in the AI era, the main skill required is code review, and there is indeed a change needed here, as existing programming courses focus mostly on writing code and then on understanding the underlying low-level mechanics.