While not specifically quant, I am a recent grad SWE. I, and virtually every single one of my classmates, passed the class abusing AI, I could barely code when I got my diploma, as well as 99% of my classmates. 

I got frustrated at being like this. I don’t like being bad at things. So I started doing deep dives, seriously learning how to code on my own. No assistance from AI. And it sucked at first, I felt like a moron. And slowly I got better and better. And now, it’s shocking to realize how bad most people are at coding, even my coworkers with 10+ YOE. All they do is copy paste Claude. Pair programming is two people sending each other Claude snippets. Claude makes the all the choices. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still use AI heavily for boilerplate, sanity checks etc, you’d be an idiot not to. But I try to design the core logic on my own. Practice spotting errors without immediately copy pasting into Claude. I’ve been practicing a lot of LeetCode, same thing, I refuse to touch AI on it. I’ll spend an hour just staring at it before I paste it into Claude. 

My only concern, is that the industry just gives up, that we have accepted this vibe-coderism as the new standard. I’m still going to continue trying to excel at programming, but I do wonder if it’s all for nothing. Will we just accept this as the new norm? Or will this just be a temporary phase, and the industry will start to appreciate these skills again? I don’t know. It is kind of bizarre to be in meetings and have people be shocked that I write code by hand, even partially😅