The inclusion of AI coding assistance affects the cognitive environment of the development experience:
AI coding assistants alter this [traditional] cognitive landscape [found in programming] by acting as external memory and cognition. This aligns with Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition, which argued that cognitive systems often extend beyond the individual to include the external environment, which can extend and enhance individual cognition.
AI Didn’t Make Programming Easier. It Just Made It Differently Difficult, by Jeremy Osborn
So AI here allows shifting of cognitive load. It is efficient at generating solutions, but the human developer now incurs a higher cost for understanding and evaluating them.
Or, per the above article, “AI makes programming differently difficult rather than simply easier.”
The second-order effects of that are interesting to contemplate.