It’s hard to see we are trading complex thinking for potential miracles of effortless engineering.
The dying culture
It’s hard to see we are trading complex thinking for potential miracles of effortless engineering.
Modern AI hype reminds me games and movies, where humanity has lost access to all the knowledge and technologies. And instead of prosperity - it has fallen back into undeveloped tribes. A limited access to ancestor technologies is the last reminder of advanced engineering.
The reality vessel of IT
For years IT was the industry that was brutally dragged from the imaginary world of graphs, stats and reports into downtimes, failures, security breaches. Day to day engineering had to matter. Because there were no way to fake, overcome or otherwise reframe the reality. It is either working well or it gets broken.
Nevertheless over the years I’ve been observing degradation in quality. New features were taking places of bugfixes, beautiful demoes became more important than reliable software. Slowly, step by step. Car industry was taken with this tendency in the beginning of the century. Now AI is taking the software industry.
The growing gap
I am in love with engineering, because it does not tolerate assumptions and inaccuracies. There is a point in time where reality check happens and no matter what’s the frame - solutions are either working or failing. It was preventing lots of wannabes and „efficient managers” from growing too high. It was almost impossible to survive and keep moving up the carrier ladder without deepening the knowledge. At least I wast hoping for that.
It’s 2026 and AI is emerging. And it’s great in many ways. But it’s always the operator of the tool either using it the right way or failing. However, in our minds the idea of „things magically done” is growing. And it’s capturing minds of the people.
The best joke of 2025 was: „are you using artificial intelligence?” „yes!” „and natural intelligence?” „rarely.”
And now we’re letting this approach to capture the IT space. The space that forms our perception. Support and often dictates our decision. The space where the essence of humanity lives. And that’s not about our sacred data. It’s the way we exchange information.
We are running towards increasing the gap between our thinking and the reality. In IT the reality is the code. The logic. Step by step. I haven’t seen business, who hasn’t discovered some nuances without understanding the business logic written as a code. Inconsistencies, conflicts, misinterpretations - as soon as these were coded it could be revealed. I learned not every business could use this powerful feedback.
Giving away all that knowledge, stripping away all the decisions, skipping questions. To make things done. 2x, 5x, 10x faster than before. How do we know that was a wrong thing to do? What is the pain point that will reveal our illusions? That prevents us from being delusional for too long?
The mental model
Repeating „AI is just a tool” is not enough. It is a tool that must change our mental model. The way we think. We can built anything. Technically. Have you heard about the Tower of Babel? Have you thought different languages means nothing! Languages can be learned. But it’s the abstract concepts that differs! And translating those rarely makes sense! It might be easier for a common-grounded languages. But real „translation” often involves translating concepts, not the words.
And now consider what may happen if we get the „unified concept translator” back. And if we use it to build the wrong thing. Again. Will upcoming generations believe in cursed machines we’ve created? Will they degrade fast enough to destroy all of it and prohibit the knowledge? Nobody knows, but these are good questions to begin with.
After all we are cursed because of equation „time is money”. We try to measure and attach the value of time, that doesn’t belong to us, to abstract money. Is it the only thing that matters? If we give up on skills of engineering - it soon becomes magic. As that’s the exact name for anything we can’t explain and understand.
For ages our vector was to learn, understand and reduce the „magic”. Are we sure we want to turn it back?