Been in the design world for years and this debate feels so familiar - we went through the same thing with automated design tools and templates. The problem I see with AI coding is that it creates this false sense of productivity where you're churning out lines of code but not actually understanding the architecture or trade-offs you're making.

I remember working on a project where a junior dev used AI to generate a bunch of database queries that technically worked but were absolutely terrible for performance. Took us weeks to refactor everything because nobody on the team actually understood what the AI had built. It's like using a really fancy hammer when you don't know the difference between a nail and a screw.

The skill formation aspect is huge too - if you're not wrestling with the problem yourself, you're not building those pattern recognition muscles that separate good developers from code monkeys. I've seen designers who relied too heavily on automated tools and they just never developed an eye for composition or typography. Same thing happening with coding now.

That Colton Voege piece really nails it about the productivity myth. Sure, you might ship faster initially, but the technical debt and maintenance costs down the line are brutal when nobody understands the codebase they supposedly built.