Differently Difficult

In AI Didn’t Make Programming Easier. It Just Made It Differently Difficult, Jeremy Osborn writes:

In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”). This shift from recall-based to judgment-based programming represents the fundamental cognitive transformation at the heart of AI-assisted development. Where traditional programming demanded that developers maintain vast internal libraries of syntax, patterns, and idioms, AI-enabled programming demands instead they maintain robust evaluative frameworks for assessing correctness, coherence, and appropriateness. The cognitive burden has not disappeared—it has relocated from retrieval to reasoning.