AI is making mediocre engineers harder to spot

Not a hot take. Just something I’ve been noticing lately.

Everyone on my team uses AI now. Code, infra, debugging, even architecture ideas.

Productivity is definitely up.

But… there’s a weird side effect.

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Case 1 — trying everything, fixing nothing

A guy was debugging a slow endpoint.

Asked AI → got a bunch of suggestions:

- add caching

- batch requests

- async processing

He tried all of them. Still slow.

Turned out the query was missing an index.

That’s it.

The problem wasn’t that AI was wrong.

It just wasn’t the right question.

And if you don’t even know “missing index” is a thing to check,

you’re basically guessing — just faster.

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Case 2 — sounds right, breaks in real life

Another one: someone built a rate limiter based on AI suggestions.

AI said: “store counters in memory for performance”.

Which… yeah, makes sense.

Until you deploy multiple instances and everything falls apart.

Now your rate limit is basically random.

Again, AI didn’t lie.

It just didn’t know (or wasn’t told) the real constraints.

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That’s the pattern I keep seeing

AI doesn’t make engineers worse.

It just makes it easier to:

- look like you know what you’re doing

- ship something that “seems fine”

- and completely miss the actual problem

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The scary part?

These people look productive.

- PRs are clean

- features ship fast

- infra “works”

But ask one level deeper:

- why this approach?

- what’s the trade-off?

- what happens under load?

…and things get very quiet.

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To be clear — I use AI every day

I’m not anti-AI at all.

It’s insanely good at:

- boilerplate

- exploring options

- explaining stuff quickly

- getting you unstuck

But it’s not the one:

- making the final call

- understanding your system

- taking responsibility when things break

That’s still on you.

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Feels like the bar is shifting

Before:

- you had to know stuff to build things

Now:

- you can build things without fully understanding them

And that gap only shows up when:

- something breaks

- or someone asks the “why” questions

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If there’s one thing I’m trying to avoid right now:

Becoming someone who can ship fast…

but can’t think deeply.

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Anyway, curious if others are seeing the same thing

Is AI actually making us better engineers?

Or just faster ones?