Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence

Beyond recall and the illusion of competence

2026-08-25

There seem to be two dominant opinions about AI and programming. One says AI is mostly useless because it writes horrible code and fixing its mistakes takes longer than writing the code yourself. The other says that AI-generated code is so good that it will eventually make programmers obsolete.

I think both arguments focus on the wrong thing because they focus on who writes the code.

We never wrote all the code

I've never considered that the ability to recall syntax and typing code from memory to be particularly important to my job. I use documentation. I search the internet. I copy examples from Stack Overflow. I read blog posts. I look at code written by colleagues.

In a modern software system, this is almost unavoidable anyway. A typical application might involve TypeScript, Python or Go, YAML, Dockerfiles, SQL, configuration files, CI pipelines and a dozen other technologies. Nobody has every detail of all of them memorized.

So if copying a useful piece of code from Stack Overflow has always been acceptable, why would asking a machine to produce that code be fundamentally different?

Ownership was never about authorship

There's another reason I don't find the "AI writes the code" argument particularly convincing: We have always worked on systems we didn't write.

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