CS student mourns coding flow states he'll never experience in the AI era
chrissyykat · x · 2026-11-12
The author shares a poignant conversation with a CS undergrad who admits AI makes it "too tempting to take the easy way out and make everything with English." The student understands there was once a beauty in naming variables precisely, refactoring clean helper functions, and seeing the structure of your thinking click into place — but he's never experienced it, having "inherited a tool without the rituals." A widely resonant observation on what the AI-native generation of programmers is losing before they ever learn it.
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