It was a normal day. The algorithm kept pushing me articles about Claude, which made sense, professionally I need to know how to work deeply with this tool. Somewhere in that research a post came across my feed. I built six websites in seventeen minutes.
I felt a strange mix of admiration and discomfort reading it.
Admiration, because the progress is undeniable. I’ve spent years around engineering teams, infrastructure, migrations, systems that had to scale under real pressure, and I know exactly how much effort used to sit behind even the simplest working product. Watching something functional appear in minutes still feels like magic to me, even now.
But the discomfort set in almost immediately.
Not because it’s fake. It isn’t. You genuinely can generate something that looks like a website in that time. Decades ago it would take weeks to get a fully functional page live. You needed to actually know the craft.
What unsettled me was what the post left out. It never touched how HTML actually works, or CSS, or the other components a website needs underneath the surface to hold together. I thought to myself, this feels great, but it tells me nothing about what building a website actually is. I knew, somewhere underneath the admiration, that this was setting people up to fail. Anyone who builds this way is one problem away from having to hand the fix back to the same tool, and most fixes generate another problem sitting quietly underneath, invisible until someone with real technical knowledge goes looking for it.
I mentor a lot of engineers. Most of them are genuinely proficient with Claude and tools like it. But when I ask whether they understand the Terraform code the model just generated for them, most can’t tell me. That’s the moment the discomfort stops being theoretical for me. It’s sitting right there in front of me, in people I actually work with.
I still remember it vividly. Last year, using Copilot, because the company had ordered it, and when I finally woke up to what was happening, I wasn’t writing my own emails anymore. I was reading meeting summaries instead of attending the meetings, which, to be fair, wasn’t entirely unwelcome, too many back to back meetings isn’t good for anyone. But I had to stop. I was losing context. I could feel the gaps opening up, places I was supposed to fill mentally and simply wasn’t anymore. That’s when I understood what it actually means to be under the spell of full automation. Not that you’re stupid. Just that you never touch anything with your own hands anymore.
I’m not arguing against these tools. I use them. I see their value. They’re genuine accelerators, and they’re changing who gets to participate in building things at all. That part is real too.
But I keep coming back to the same question. Why the rush. I like to take my time learning things properly, slowly enough that when something breaks, I actually know where to look.