I felt satisfied watching the ‘real programmers’ panic.

The kids who looked down on me at Waterloo⁷. The ones who got celebrated for being good at math. Who got hired by Google while I got laid off from my first internship.

When AI started writing code, they got scared. And I thought: karma hits at the end.

I'm not proud of it. But I felt it.

That lasted about three weeks.

A few weeks ago I was building this game. Founder simulation - condense 10 years of running a company into an hour. Kind of a fun project.

Used Claude, Cursor, whatever. More than 3,000 lines of Next.js. It worked. I could test it, play it, ship it.

Then I had this thought that kind of messed with me.

In college, we had this hierarchy. Engineers at the top. QA at the bottom. The joke was - if you don't know anything, your first internship is QA.

And here I am. Opening browsers. Clicking buttons. Checking if things break. While AI writes all the code.

That sat with me for a while.

It's like filling your gas tank at random pumps at random stations. You don't know what's in the tank - whether it’s diesel or gas. The car still drives.

Until one day it doesn't. And you have no idea why.

GitClear looked at 211 million lines of code¹ across Google, Microsoft, Meta. Code reuse dropped from 25% to less than 10%. Copy-paste surged. First time in software history that developers are copying more than reusing.

40% of developers² now spend 2-5 days a month just debugging AI-generated code. Half their time fixing instead of building.

For a side project, whatever. Who cares.

For something people actually use? I'm one weird bug away from not understanding my own product.

Here's the thing that broke my brain.

METR ran a study with experienced open-source developers. With AI, they were 19% slower³.

But they felt 24% faster.

Even after seeing the data, they still believed they'd done better.

43 points between feeling and reality⁴.

Watching code appear feels like achievement. The dopamine hit is real. The productivity isn't.

I felt it too. Shipping 3,000 lines felt like flying.

Understanding none of it felt like nothing. Until I stopped to think about it.

So I signed up for Frontend Masters⁵.

Not to prove anything. Just uncomfortable. I had developers writing code, AI writing code, and I couldn't read any of it. Couldn't trace a bug. Couldn't explain what was happening in my own product.

Right now it's Next.js. Then TypeScript. Then React. Then Node. Not syntaxes - how these things actually work.

Here's the weird part. I hated learning to code in college. Like, hated it.

Now I kind of love it.

No assignments. No exams. No passing grades. Just learning because I can see the utility. Every lesson connects to something I'm actually building.

Turns out I didn't hate coding. I hated learning it for no reason.

Everyone's saying coding is dead.

Bootcamp enrollment is up 30%⁶. Market growing 9-15% annually. Career changers rushing to learn AI-integrated development.

They're not learning instead of AI. They're learning with it.

You can't build without permission if you can't read your own code.

If I have to ask someone every time something breaks, I'm asking for permission. If I can't trace it myself, I'm dependent.

Being technical is freedom. Not being technical is just a different kind of trap.

I'm 27. I think I'll still need to understand code when I'm 70.

Maybe not writing it with my hands. Maybe voice. Maybe something else.

But reading it. Knowing what's happening. That doesn't go away.

Still figuring it out. But I'm tired of being the QA.

Changelog launched. I ship a lot. Keeping users informed always sucked - Notion pages nobody checks, release notes buried in GitHub. So I built something simple. Boards, versions, categories, rich content. No bloat. I use it daily.

Honest Money is live. Financial advice online is mostly garbage - sponsored content disguised as recommendations. This is an interactive quiz that finds the right credit cards, loans, or savings accounts for your situation. Full transparency on affiliate commissions. If we earn from a link, you'll know how much. 6 years of fintech experience went into this.

-George