It's a really interesting question.
I'm sure you could go back 40 years earlier and find programmers complaining about using FORTRAN and COBOL compilers instead writing the assembly by hand.
I think that the assembler->compiler transition is a better metaphor for the brain->brain+AI transition than Visual Studio's old-hat autocomplete etc.
After working with Cursor for a couple of hours, I had a bunch of code that was working according to my tests, but when I integrated it, I found that Claude had inferred a completely different protocol for interacting with data structure than the rest of my code was using. Yeah, write better tests... but I then found that I did not really understand most of the code Claude had written, even though I'd approved every change on a granular level. Worked manually through an solid hour of wtf before I figured out the root cause, then Clauded my way through the fix.
I can picture an assembly developer having a similar experience trying to figure out why the compiler generated _this_ instead of _that_ in the decade where every byte of memory mattered.
Having lived through the dumb editor->IDE transition, though, I _never_ had anything like that experience of not understanding what I'd done in hours 1 and 2 at the very beginning of hour 3.
I'm sure you could go back 40 years earlier and find programmers complaining about using FORTRAN and COBOL compilers instead writing the assembly by hand.
I think that the assembler->compiler transition is a better metaphor for the brain->brain+AI transition than Visual Studio's old-hat autocomplete etc.
After working with Cursor for a couple of hours, I had a bunch of code that was working according to my tests, but when I integrated it, I found that Claude had inferred a completely different protocol for interacting with data structure than the rest of my code was using. Yeah, write better tests... but I then found that I did not really understand most of the code Claude had written, even though I'd approved every change on a granular level. Worked manually through an solid hour of wtf before I figured out the root cause, then Clauded my way through the fix.
I can picture an assembly developer having a similar experience trying to figure out why the compiler generated _this_ instead of _that_ in the decade where every byte of memory mattered.
Having lived through the dumb editor->IDE transition, though, I _never_ had anything like that experience of not understanding what I'd done in hours 1 and 2 at the very beginning of hour 3.