You Can’t Prompt Your Way to Intuition

We don’t talk enough about the feeling of learning something deeply – the slow, sometimes frustrating and painful process that forges real intuition.

As software engineers, we know this feeling intimately. The slow burn of mastering a new concept or language. The pressure and anxiety of resolving your first production issue. The endless hours spent debugging a complex system that just won’t work – until, at last, it does. And how that struggle itself is the point: it’s what transforms a beginner coder into a software engineer with real intuition.

And yet, in the age of AI, that friction is exactly what we’re designing away.

GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf – they’re extraordinary tools. They’ve changed the way we work. They accelerate us. They enable us to solve problems we previously would’ve struggled with. They’re becoming the new normal.

But they also flatten the terrain. And when the terrain is too smooth, we stop noticing what we’re stepping over.

Source: You Can’t Prompt Your Way to Intuition – Annie Vella