I have a confession. Somewhere around day nine of this experiment, I almost quit and went back to my old setup. Not because ChatGPT was bad. Because I was bad at using it. I kept typing half-questions the way I'd type into Google, hitting enter, and getting answers that were technically correct and completely useless.
It took me about a week to realize the problem wasn't the tool. It was twelve years of muscle memory.
This post is the long version of what happened when I tried to go a full month without my usual stack of developer crutches — Google, Stack Overflow, Regex101, JSONLint, a SQL formatter site, a commit message generator, a pile of bookmarked Docker cheat sheets, and a few other tabs I didn't even realize I kept open until they were gone — and replaced all of it with a single ChatGPT window.
I work as a backend-leaning full stack engineer at a small e-commerce company. Python and Django on the server, a chunk of Node for a couple of internal services, Postgres, Docker, and an AWS setup that I inherited rather than designed. Nothing exotic. Which is actually why I think this experiment is useful — most of you reading this aren't working on some bleeding-edge ML pipeline either. You're maintaining stuff, fixing stuff, shipping features under deadlines that someone in another department picked without asking you.
