AI Coding Assistants Are Making Developers Lazy (And That's Actually Good)

The hot take everyone's avoiding: AI coding assistants are making developers "lazy" — and we should celebrate it. I'm watching developers panic about Copilot, Cursor, and the latest AI coding tools "doing the work for them." The fear is real: Will I forget how to code? Am I becoming dependent? What if the AI writes bad code? Wrong questions. Here are the right ones. The Abstraction Ladder Never Stops Remember when developers worried that high-level languages would make them "forget" assembly? That IDEs with autocomplete would make them "forget" syntax? That Stack Overflow would make them "forget" how to problem-solve? Each abstraction layer didn't make developers dumber. It made them focus on what actually matters. Assembly → C → Python → frameworks → AI assistance. Same ladder, higher rung. What "Lazy" Really Means When developers say AI makes them lazy, they usually mean: Less time debugging syntax errors Less memorizing API documentation Less writing boilerplate code Less context-sw