You don’t need to write code by hand to learn from iterations and experiments. I run more experiments and try out more different solutions than I ever could before, and that leads to better decisions. I still read all the code that gets shipped, and don’t want to give that up, but the idea that all craft and learning is lost when you don’t is a bit silly. The craft/learning just moves.
How much calculus do you think you could pick up skimming a textbook without doing exercises?
We mocked these "architects" from experience. We knew that if you weren't feeling the friction yourself, you wouldn't learn enough to do good design.
Maybe you don't care about engineering great systems. Most companies don't. It's good for profit. This isn't new, though AI enables less care.
Imo the biggest issue with these no-code architects has been that you could become one without ever having coded at any noteworthy level of skill (which meant most of them were like this).
In my experience, in a lot of organizations, a lot of people either lacked the ability or the willingness to achieve any level of technical competence.
Many of these people played the management game, and even if they started out as devs (very mediocre ones at best), they quickly transitioned out from the trenches and started producing vague technical guidance that usually did nothing to address the problems at hand, but could be endlessly recycled to any scenario.
The entire mistake you are making is comparing using AI to skimming textbooks, or taking shortcuts. Your entire premise is wrong.
People who care about craft will care about the quality of what they produce whether they use AI or not.
The code I ship now is better tested and better thought through now than before I used AI because I can do a lot more. That extra time goes into additional experiments, jumping down more rabbit holes, and trying out ideas I previously couldn’t due to time constraints. It’s freeing to be able to spend more time to improve quality because the ROI on time spent experimenting has gone up dramatically.
This is an unpopular take, but when I was in undergrad maths in an old-school two-semester courses with one exam (exercises + oral) to cover it at the end, I was able to get to 60-80% score on exercises when I did just theory as prep.
I couldn't get exercises done where there were tricks/shortcuts which are learned by doing a lot of exercises, but for many, these are still the same tricks/shortcuts used in proofs.
This was indeed rare among students, but let's not discount that there are people who _can_ learn from well systemized material and then apply that in practice. Everyone does this to an extent or everyone would have to learn from the basics.
The problem with SW design is that it is not well systemized, and we still have at least two strong opposing currents (agile/iterative vs waterfall/pre-designed).