Programmers Swept Along by AI Tools

2026-06-04

On June 1, GitHub Copilot switched to a usage-based pricing model. Under my previous usage pattern, the new pricing model would cost me at least $800 per month, so I had to look for a cheaper plan. As a result, during the last two or three days, in addition to focusing on the work itself, I have had to spend a great deal of time and energy trying tools and models such as Antigravity and CodexX and dealing with the context friction caused by switching between different tools.

Of course, I still maintain my usual prejudice: I do not use Claude Code’s tools or models. Claude Code’s models are too obedient and suffer severely from the streetlight effect.


This led me to another thought. Since the arrival of AI, the questions we care about have become:

  1. Which AI model is easier to use?
  2. Which AI plan is cheaper?
  3. Which AI tool is easier to use and has better prompt engineering?

Before AI appeared, the questions we cared about were:

  1. Which programming language is easier to use?
  2. Which programming language compiles faster, is simpler to write, imposes less cognitive burden, and keeps runtime errors under control?
  3. Which IDE is easier to use?

Before AI appeared, someone stood up and said:

  1. Programming languages are not important; programming ideas are what matter.
  2. The syntax of a programming language is not important; what matters is understanding its semantics at a fundamental level.
  3. I will teach you how to learn every programming language.
  4. My job is not to evaluate the existing garbage languages, but to design the most advanced and elegant programming language.
  5. …

After the arrival of AI, will someone stand up and say:

  1. AI models are not important; the person using AI is what matters.
  2. A good programmer should know how to command every kind of AI model.
  3. Understanding how to use AI models is only superficial; what matters is deeply understanding how they are trained and where their “intelligence” comes from.
  4. I will teach you how to understand every AI model.
  5. My job is not to evaluate the existing garbage models, but to design the most efficient and advanced AI model.
  6. …

Will such a person appear? 🐶


In fact, I have a deeper anxiety:

In the AI era, are the programming languages and principles we once learned merely knowledge and skills from the age of handicrafts—already obsolete, outdated, and unimportant? You can say that they remain important in principle, but the fact is that AI has indeed flattened the differences in ability among most programmers.

Or let me ask a different question: in the AI era, is understanding lambda calculus still important? If Turing were brought into the present day, he certainly would not know how to write modern code, and his ability to call APIs would be little different from that of an ordinary programmer using AI. What insight do you think this idea offers?