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This post does not make the claim that "you should know everything about everything you work on" - its making the claim that writing code and being able to read code effectively are intrinsically linked.

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Author here. Thank you. I absolutely was not stating that, and I don't think its possible or necessary to "know everything", but there's certainly a movement in the industry (and not a small one) that is advocating to abandon even looking at code. It started with Karpathy's "vibe coding" tweet and has extended to now where entire teams are performing "LGTM" level code reviews, while simultaneously reporting that they are finding it difficult to remember how to read, nevertheless write, code properly. "Thinking in code" is a form of thinking that is distinctly different than staying at the higher engineering levels of planning and architecture, and yet they are completely intertwined and interdependent. I plan better when I am engaging with code, and I code better when I know how to plan properly.

I've been thinking about it as a sort of debt. My team sees AI as nothing but a positive. Work gets done faster, what's not to like. I think the piper will need to be paid at some point when we look back and realize how a) completely dependent we've become b) unable to reason about our own code base.

I really hope I'm wrong but I can see it already happening.

I wonder if it's not so much the coding that people don't want to write, but it's more about the weight of all the orchestration, data engineering and research that has to be done (or, understood in the first place) to get anything off the ground these days. It feels off the charts complicated, and of course is now shifting rapidly.

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