AI is just another abstraction layer

Software engineers are starting to skip reading and understanding code because Opus 4.5 writes it "perfectly".

Anyone who has built a production system knows that's not true.

Opus, or any other model, is just another abstraction layer.

Abstraction layers have historically added to what engineers need to know, not replaced it. We stopped writing assembly, sure. But we didn't stop needing to understand what the machine is doing. Engineers debugging production performance issues still trace things down to memory and CPU cycles.

Skipping the foundations is never a good idea.

The real question isn't "do we need to understand code?" but "what happens when the AI gets it wrong?"

Because it will.

And when your AI-generated codebase has a race condition or a performance problem at scale, someone needs to understand what's actually happening under the hood.

AI-generated code quickly sacrifices readability and modularity. Bad practices snowball if you're not paying attention. These codebases become hard to maintain and debug.

I foresee companies hiring experienced engineers in the future just to untangle projects from the AI slop.

I know things are changing. But we shouldn't solely rely on AI code and shut down our brains to save an extra hour.