Is This Another Level of Abstraction or Is It a Bigger Evolution?
AI has put more distance between me and the code. I’m afraid of forgetting some of it—and starting to think that distance may be the point.
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Some days now I don’t even open a code editor. Codex and Cursor have shifted my work from IDE-based to prompt-based, and I’ve gotten far enough away from the code that I’m starting to worry I’ll forget how to do it.
But honestly, for someone like me—someone who can get stuck in implementation details, or build a project in React and then rebuild the whole thing in Next just to see if it’s better—not being in the weeds is probably not a bad thing.
Maybe this is just what every abstraction shift feels like. My dad actually moved from assembly to C. His generation also watched programming move from decks of punch cards and batch jobs—where you might wait hours to find out whether a program ran—to interactive terminals and higher-level languages. None of those were clean replacements, and neither is this. But each shift moved people farther from one layer of the machinery and closer to the thing they were trying to make.
There is still something worth protecting in knowing how the machinery works. I don’t want to forget the code. But I also don’t think staying close to every implementation detail is the same thing as doing better work.