Agents of Our Own Illiteracy July 10, 2026
I worry our software industry is drifting towards illiteracy.
We don’t want to read changelogs. Dependabot just opens a PR we mindlessly merge.
We don’t want to review PRs. Codex can digest them, highlight concerns, and write the alterations.
We don’t want to code up prototypes. Claude Code can explore five ideas before breakfast.
We don’t want to learn what new capabilities our platforms have. We want to watch a video of someone reading and download a set of Markdown skills.
We want to be the commander surrounded by sharp secretaries who make sense of our half-thoughts.
We want to make important things but then expect a ghostwriter to put it into words.
We automate so much because we’ve added so many processes, yet we’ve become less involved in the process of learning and making.
Losing our literacy leads to losing own agency.
Which leads to the loss of your intrinsic value and long term potential to negotiate a decent salary.
We become dependent on monthly subscriptions to make things.
We get into a situation where without training wheels we always fall off our bike. And we no longer own the bike, the bicycle for the mind. We rent it.
How can we improve our literacy? These AI agents can be incredible research assistants, with a wealth of information available to extract with the right question.
But to know the question is to have a deeper understanding of what you are making.
To write a prompt is to transcribe my thoughts. Are my thoughts getting both shallower and deeper from the process?
Do I understand what I’ve made? Am I able to debug it? If I see a stacktrace will any of the lines be of familiar files? If a user has a question is my reflex to ask an agent?
Why is it that customers ask me? Because of the brand I own or am a custodian of?
What are customers paying for? Because I claim to be able to help this brand and be accountable for parts of it? Yet is the agent accountable to me?
If a brand becomes a logo hoisted above a troupe of agents then who owns the brand? We outsourced the manufacturing of hardware and now we eagerly do the same with software. Perhaps one day it’ll make a fascinating history book for my agent to read to me.