Coding changed more in the last year than the decade before it. And I'm watching two types of students emerge around me.
One group is shipping constantly: three projects a week, impressive GitHub streaks, always something new to show. Ask them how their project works under the hood and they go quiet. They didn't build it; they directed it. The other group is doing the opposite: ignoring every tool that could free up their thinking, learning syntax line by line, staying strictly within the syllabus. Technically clean. Practically behind.
"Both are losing. Just in different ways."
The problem isn't AI. It's using it without knowing what you're actually trying to get good at. Figure out what you're building toward, then offload everything outside that to AI, and go deep on everything inside it.
Shipping is good. Mindless shipping isn't. If you can't explain what your project does, why you made the decisions you made, and where it would break, you didn't build anything. You just watched AI build it for you.
The full piece lives on Medium. Read it there if you want the whole thing.
Shoryavardhaan Gupta is a 17-year-old builder and developer from Kolkata, India, shipping civic tech, hardware, and AI projects — including Buy4Chai and SarkarSathi. He published AI planning research on Zenodo at 15 and leads the Kolkata fork of Bits&Bytes.