AI Doesn't Lighten the Burden of Mastery; AI Makes It Easy to Stop Valuing It

Summary

AI As False Mastery Claude wrote me Go tests that passed. They were beautiful, and they were worthless. They all collapsed to true == true. That's the trap. AI gives us the illusion of mastery without the work. The shape of the code looks right, making it easy to skim the details. I'm not being careless choosing to use AI. None of us are. Claude is a gift: it can write Go code with tests, comments, SQL queries, and the shape of a real feature. It can produce a Svelte frontend with components and fetch calls, and it even knows the backend API signatures. It feels like you're being handed quality work, like the boilerplate has been finally solved. Yet, when I worked to debug the Svelte code Claude had generated, it took forty minutes of rereading code and tutorials to see that Claude had casually mixed version 4 and 5 syntax. I had seen it written, I had nodded along, skimming, until I forced myself to stop, trace through the code, and uncover why it didn't behave. The AI had moved me forward, but it hadn't saved me the real work. I had thought I was mastering front end development, quickly. But mastery still required: building the model, holding it in my head, doing the thinking. False mastery is mistaking convincing syntax for real understanding. The False Mastery Trap There's a cultural conversation Software People are having about AI. We're thoughtful professionals, and we try hard to do good work. That's exactly why this false mastery is dangerous: AI makes us feel like we can finally relax and still get good results. The problem isn't that the tool is bad. It's like fitness: you stop going to the gym for a day and it's not too hard to get back on track, but stop for a few weeks and turning the habit back on feels...not harder, but less essential; you got this far without the gym, what harm's another day? The gym's still a good tool, still the right tool, but I'm less focused. The problem is that we recognise the shape of the implementation AI generates, so we th...