The LLM you're coding with is a product, tuned by people whose business depends on your next prompt. That incentive quietly punishes calibrated uncertainty, which reads as weakness, and rewards the confident answer that sounds like competence whether or not it earned it.
The path to programming expertise used to run through breaking your own code and debugging the wreckage, over and over. LLMs just deleted that grind. Junior devs now learn by reviewing AI-generated code instead of writing it from scratch.
Food critics who can't cook at Michelin level. Editors who don't write novels. Casting directors who can't act.
Different skills, not lesser skills?
LLMs are revealing something we usually sweep under the rug: generation and evaluation are cognitively asymmetric. Research on utterance planning shows construction is harder than execution. Starting with nothing costs more cognitive load than refining something that already exists.
This phenomenon isn't new. "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" (1983) mocked structured programming as "quiche eating." Every abstraction faced resistance from people who valued control over leverage.
Review-first programming isn't a decline. It's specialization. And the developers adapting fastest aren't the ones who generate the most code. They're the ones who know what not to build.