No Longer Know How Their Code Really Works, you say? They never did. Before AI was stack overflow. I saw tons of code copy and pasted with comments like, "this seems to work fine." Then I'd search for that code and find it right where I expected. No variables were renamed. In fact, the original comments were still there too. Then, of course, you'd see unnecessary code to actually make it function because the copied code had it.
I've also asked AI to write code for me, I look at the code and it's wrong because the AI doesn't understand the context of the code. However, I have written some code snippets I thought could be better written and asked the AI to fix it for me and yes, it did a great job.
But, yea, you need to understand what it's doing.
yeah, even when I would look at stack overflow I would still spend the time to understand what the code was doing. I never asked questions but looked at what others did when I ran into problems or was debugging someone else's code (that looked like it was copied directly from stack overflow).
People used to understand what they were doing and why. That has changed a lot over the years.