There’s a post doing the rounds that I keep coming back to, written by someone with eleven years of coding experience who had a genuinely unsettling moment last month. They hit an intermittent network timeout bug — the classic kind, only appearing in production, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a seasoned developer to chew through methodically — and found themselves completely lost without AI to guide them. Not just slower. Actually lost. The internal voice that used to generate hypotheses had gone quiet.