You are definitely not alone, and it’s unfortunate when people pushing AI ignore that legitimate fear and talk past it.

You are right, there is something you lose, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think the loss is necessarily critical thinking - I think it’s possible to use AI and still hone your critical thinking skills.

The thing you start to lose first is touching the code directly, of course, making the constant stream of small decisions, syntax, formatting, naming, choosing container classes, and a large set of other things. And sometimes it’s the doing battle with those small decisions that leads to deeper understanding. However, it is true, and AI agents are proving, that a lot of us have to make the same small decisions over and over, and we’re frequently repeating designs that many other people have already thought through. So one positive tradeoff for this loss is better leveraging of ground already covered.

Another way to think about AI is that it can help you spend all of your time doing and thinking about software design and goals and outcomes rather that having to spend the majority of it in the minutiae of writing the code. This is where you can continue to apply critical thinking, just perhaps at a higher level than before. AI can make you lazy, if you let it. It does take some diligence and effort to remain critical, but if you do, personally I think it can be a lot of fun and help you spend more time thinking critically, rather than less.

Some possible analogies are calculators and photography. People were fretting we’d lose something if we stop calculating divisions by hand, and we do, but we still just use calculators by and large. People also thought photography would ruin art and prevent people from being able to make or appreciate images.

Software in general is nearly always automating something that someone was doing by hand, and in way every time we write a program we’re making this same tradeoff, losing the close hands-on connection to the thing we were doing in favor of something a touch more abstract and a lot faster.