It works and I don't know why.
That is the most dangerous sentence I can say about my own code, and it got very easy to say. I started writing software in 2025, the year AI got good enough to write most of it for me. I have never learned to code without it.
Most of what I read about this is written by people who learned first and got the tool second. For them AI removed a toll booth: they already knew the roads, and now they pay less to drive them. I never paid the toll. I arrived after it was gone.
That is a different situation, and it comes with a different temptation. If you started when the machine could already write the thing, skipping the part where you understand it is not a slippery slope you have to be talked into. It is the default. It is faster, it works, and nobody can tell from the outside of the software side.
So the question I care about is not whether AI makes me a worse programmer. The tool is here, I use it every day, and I would be slower and poorer without it. The question is narrower: when the machine hands you working code, what separates learning something from collecting something?
