From books and magazines to Google, Stack Overflow, and now AI prompts—a journey through how developers have learned (and stopped learning) over four generations. A follow-up to ‘The Lego Generation’ for the AI era.

AI coding tools have become indispensable, but they affect junior and senior developers very differently. Like an exoskeleton, AI amplifies what’s already there—but what happens to the muscles you never had to build?

A young developer asked what’s changed in 30 years of software development. The answer: everything and nothing. We’ve traded assembly for JavaScript, deep understanding for fast results, and writing everything ourselves for assembling things we barely understand. But has the trade been worth it?