GitHub Copilot and Claude are making developers faster. But are they making developers better? An honest look at what AI tools might be doing to raw coding skills.
I noticed something uncomfortable a few months ago. I was shipping faster than ever. Copilot was autocompleting my functions. Claude was helping me debug in minutes what used to take hours. By any productivity metric I was performing at my best.
Then I sat down to do a LeetCode problem without any AI assistance. Something felt off. The muscle memory was slower. The instinct to reach for the answer before working through the problem had gotten stronger. I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or if something real was happening to my raw coding ability.
I started asking other developers if they felt the same thing. Most of them did. Nobody had a good answer for what to do about it.
The Productivity Trap:
