The aviation industry has a term that should terrify every developer leaning on AI coding tools: automation complacency . Pilots figured out decades ago that the more you rely on autopilot, the worse you get at actually flying the plane. And when the autopilot fails — because it always eventually does — you'd better hope your manual skills haven't atrophied. We're living through the exact same transition in software engineering right now. AI coding assistants are our autopilot, and most of us haven't thought about what happens when we need to hand-fly. The Aviation Parallel: Children of the Magenta In pilot training, there's a famous concept called "Children of the Magenta" — a reference to the magenta-colored flight director lines on cockpit displays. Some pilots become so dependent on following those magenta lines that when the automation disengages, they freeze. They've lost the instinct to scan instruments, interpret raw data, and make manual corrections.…