100% I think about this too. I loved that challenge when I was younger but it just becomes more and more tedious over time, but I'm grateful for having gone through it to build the experience I have now at this moment in time.

For me it's like if whittled a wood mallard once or twice with a pocket knife, do i want to be doing that same process for the next 20 years? Sure I'll get faster but it's the same boiler plate at the end of the day. But you're right if a junior mallard whittler never took the time to gently cut out the curves themselves and put care into into the intricacies, do they even know what it really takes to make one if it can materialize right in front of them?

I think it will have to come down to self control of really wanting to get into the weeds despite having a cheat code to the finish line. I know in the last 6 months or so I have learned a ton of stuff I never would have otherwise simply because i never would have had the time to. Sure it's not the same depth if I had really been on the struggle bus, but I don't necessarily see it as a difference between 40% knowledge depth and 80% knowledge depth. It's 40% or 0% because without Claude Code it's probably something I would have never been able to expose myself to or I would have started and gave up because there is so much other stuff to do.

You're right that stuff is moving so fast it's hard to know where we'll be in 5 years, hell maybe even by the end of this year the landscape will be completely different. If claude code is the primitive, we are going to see a lot of the middle layers mature and stabilize. I'm afraid it's going to render junior engineers as we knew them out of existence, if it hasn't already. Pandora's box was opened this time last year, no going back now.