You asked for it:

This is an incredibly stupid take, and I genuinely can’t believe people are upvoting it.

Have you actually used an AI agent at any point in the last six months?

Your entire argument seems to rest on the bizarre assumption that describing what you want is roughly equivalent in effort to producing it yourself. It isn’t. That’s literally why abstractions and tools exist.

I can describe the architecture I want in a few paragraphs and have an agent generate a Mermaid diagram. I can give it a pile of documents and have it pull together information I didn’t manually write into the prompt. I can describe the structure and content of a presentation and have it generate the actual PowerPoint. I can give it a repetitive refactoring task that I fully understand how to perform myself and have it apply that change across a codebase.

The fact that I need enough expertise to verify the result doesn’t somehow eliminate the time saved producing it.

I know how to write Java without an IDE. That doesn’t mean IntelliJ becomes useless because I need to understand Java to verify whether the code it generates, refactors, or autocompletes is correct.

And the claim that requiring expertise somehow eliminates AI’s usefulness is particularly strange. Most useful tools require expertise. IDEs require expertise. CAD software requires expertise. Excel requires expertise if you’re doing anything remotely complicated with it. Their purpose isn’t necessarily to let an unskilled person impersonate an expert; it’s to make an expert substantially more productive.

Natural language also isn’t the only interface. Modern agents operate on files, repositories, documents, databases, APIs, tool outputs, search results, and existing context. The prompt can literally be “turn this into a presentation” or “diagram this architecture.” You don’t have to painstakingly reconstruct the entire source material in prose first.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of generative AI: hallucinations, unreliable output, loss of control in certain workflows, mediocre prose, inappropriate use cases, people blindly trusting the output, etc.

But “if you know enough to check its work, you might as well have done the work yourself” is basically an argument for coding in Notepad because a competent programmer shouldn’t need a stupid machine-assisted IDE.

Knowing how to do something and wanting to spend your time manually doing every part of it are not the same thing.