> skill atrophy is real

It is also both a choice and avoidable.

Atrophy happens when you trade understanding for productivity. Productivity benefits your employer and your KPIs, but not your understanding and your opportunities going forward.

Understanding used to be an unavoidable of the exploration process, and writing documentation used to be the thing that never got done. Now, writing documentation is automatic, but reading it still isn't.

I've been managing a team of interns at my last job, and as they were all equipped with coding agents, they'd deliver complete solutions to problems once or several times per day that would normally take days, or weeks if you factor in necessary learning.

As review of their understanding, and for the sake of my own cognitive debt, I would first ask them the question "How does it work?" and they usually couldn't answer. After a handful of tasks, they started preparing answers. This forth-and-back is still more shallow than getting the deep knowledge chiseled through hours of trial and error, debugging and wrong directions. Spending two hours to find a problem to realize you forgot to save or upload a file, or had an x instead of a y. I look back with nostalgia, and I wonder if there weren't always better ways, and we just get to pick them now. I can literally convert any task, solved or not, into a quiz that brings me towards understanding, in rainbow-colored pig latin.