I never thought I'd say this as someone who has embraced AI from the beginning, but after relying on it heavily for an extended period of time, I realized something that caught me off guard:
I was becoming less capable of writing code on my own.
Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the way we build software, and I would be lying if I said it hasn't made me a more productive engineer. I use AI almost every day, and there is no denying that it can dramatically reduce the time it takes to solve problems, scaffold new features, explain unfamiliar concepts, or even uncover bugs that might have taken much longer to find on my own. For a while, it felt like I had discovered a superpower. The more I leaned into AI, the more productive I became. Features shipped faster, repetitive work disappeared, and I found myself spending less time searching through documentation or piecing together solutions manually.
Then I noticed something that I wasn't expecting.
The more I relied on AI to produce code, the less comfortable I became producing it myself. I hadn't forgotten how to program, but I had unknowingly started disconnecting myself from the work. Instead of sitting with a problem long enough to understand it deeply, I found myself asking AI to generate the solution almost immediately. Instead of tracing through code to understand why something worked, I accepted explanations that were already synthesized for me. Even when debugging, my first instinct became asking AI where the issue might be instead of methodically walking through the application myself. None of these decisions seemed harmful in isolation, but over time they accumulated into a habit that slowly eroded the very skills I had spent years developing.
