Let me tell you four things that happened to me.
One. I sat in a mock interview. The question was basic — embarrassingly basic for someone who'd been coding for months. And I went completely blank. Not because I didn't know the concept. I did. I'd used it dozens of times. But every single time I'd used it, I'd asked AI first. I never had to hold the answer in my own head. So when someone asked me to pull it out of my head on the spot, there was nothing there.
Two. I looked at a file in my own project — code I wrote, in a project I built — and I couldn't explain what one of the functions was doing. I remembered asking AI for it. I remembered copying it. I remembered it working. But the understanding? I never actually got it. I just got the output.
Three. A friend of mine — also a junior — lost internet access for two hours during a coding session. He sent me a message that I still think about: "I don't know how to do anything without it." He wasn't joking. He sat there until the connection came back.
Four. And me. All three of those stories are me.
