AI is making me dumb

I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code. That ick feeling counteracts the dopamine hit of having a working app after a few minutes of vibe coding, and I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon.

That said, I have experience. I could absolutely see myself falling into this as a junior or even mid level dev. I'd no doubt not feel that feeling on my neck if it wasn't scarred from code review lashings early in my career by knowledgeable mentors.

As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security.

After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life. However, based on my experience, it will bite you if you trust it blindly. Even in my vibecoded projects, it keeps adding "features" without me asking for them. Since they're just pet projects, I don’t really care as long as the end result is what I'm expecting, but I don’t think companies will be as flexible. I also don't think customers would like it if features changed or got added with every new fix or update.

So this could go in a bunch of different directions from here, but to summarize the current situation:

    A lot of companies are heading in this direction.
    Without proper engineering, AI will easily write more code and potentially change the application unintentionally.
    We will have fewer junior engineers entering the market because of fear around AI and reduced hiring.
    AI usage will hit a critical point where it is making massive amounts of changes, and the people "prompting" it might start getting overwhelmed.
    We will end up with more features that people have to keep in their heads. I don’t think we can trust LLMs 100%, and because of that, developers will still need to know exactly what the application does.
    Eventually, there will be a lot of bugs, and developers will complain that we need additional human resources.
    Hiring starts again.

"With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code."

I just can't understand this as a programmer. I use AI a lot as well when I program but I still write a lot of the code by myself just because it is easier to write the code I want, specially if I know what I want, than to make AI understand what kind of implementation I'm thinking of.

We talk a lot about the risks of AI in schools, but those same risks apply in any learning environment.

I recently started a new job and I find that AI is making it so much harder for me to onboard. I am adjusting to my role much slower than my peers who are using AI less. I am coding in a language I am unfamiliar with, which makes the lure of vibe coding stronger. I am at least skilled enough to recognize when Claude gives me an answer that either makes no sense or is unnecessarily verbose. But the more time I spend asking Claude to write code, the less I feel like I'm developing the skills that the job requires. Plus, when I submit a PR, I lack the necessary confidence in my own work, which just feels bad.

Honestly, another part of this is that I'm asking Claude to search through Slack and docs for answers to questions when I should just ask another person. The AI is feeding my social anxiety, luring me into avoiding human contact that I know will be good for my understanding as well as my general need for social interaction.

That all sounds like I am absolving myself of responsibility, but I think it's important to point out how a given technology is especially addictive for a certain type of person, and traps them in a negative behavioral cycle. If I hold off on relying on AI now, I suspect I can grow in my skills to the point that I can delegate tasks to AI that are rote and easy for me to verify their results. It feels challenging, but it's necessary.

It is impossible to be made less smart by not manually writing code. If it were possible, you would be stupider every time you go on vacation. Your brain's neuronal connections do not die from talking to a chat bot.

What's actually happened is you took a break from a highly technical skill. Every person on the planet will "forget" some part of that technical skill if they don't use it in a while. But the information is not gone, it's just been de-prioritized for other more pertinent information. The information comes back once you give yourself a refresher.

Before AI, it would be months between me writing a full program in one of several languages. I would forget simple things like how to start a function definition. But I did not really forget, because after a quick glance at an existing function, I remembered all the other possible syntax in the function definition. There's no need to panic, your brain is working normally.

I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented.

I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the productionizing of them. It has really allowed me to command a team of agents instead of keeping track of a bunch of humans of varying work ethic, skill, and ability to maintain high code quality. And often AI is very good at maintaining patterns used in the code base or even keeping them to industry best practices.

When using AI you will no longer be writing so much in programming languages—English or whatever language you talk to the LLM will be the main language.

For my current project I'm coding every day in Java, ruby, and JavaScript. I waste a lot of tokens doing what used to be simple google searches for language differences since I mix up things like the null-safe operator ruby vs jscript or what is the continue/break statement in ruby vs java. I think Claude is probably very disappointed in me that the most complicated thing I use it for is refactoring old Java loops to use more modern streams which can be unwritable for a human off the top of your head.

I feel that few will have the privilege to have the time to write code by hand. And let's actually see what we are actually writing, most of the time for me its nothing novel, nothing fancy its the same old create a backend for X, fix some simple bug and stuff that are trivial for a mid-senior programmer. The harder tasks are mostly (again for us) architectural decision over the code and I am even thinking of how we can develop a system where LLM wouldn't derail on feature implementations. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that you writing code by hand may be okay for now but in the future I believe the shareholders and whoever is on top of you will want you to deliver features/fixing bugs FASTER with the help of LLMs and if you can't deliver that you will under perform. So in the end it's not what we want but what the shareholder wants. Of course if you aren't drained by this you can write code by hand in your free time. I don't want to sounds like a doomer but I believe this will be very much a reality sometime soon.

I am getting the exact opposite experience. But it is probably because I am in a domain where code/software is a tool, not the product.

I find myself learning exponentially faster and more. For example, I am working with spectroscopy hardware currently (raman, nmr) where I got Claude to write code that interfaces with equipment on a hardware level. Instead of me going through data sheets and writing out a bunch of wrapper code, Claude did it for me.

I am able to progress much faster by using Claude to discuss various techniques, implement them, and test it out. This loop would have probably taken me 5-10x more time previously.

And I am learning so much more about these machines/techniques/data than I would have if I had to expend the mental effort to write menial code just to see a result.

I have more than a decade of experience as a developer. I am glad that we are finally moving towards a world where we can utilize code as a tool rather than constantly trying to think how to make it into a product.

The main thing that was dumbing me down (and burning me out) was having to babysit LLMs on anything except basic tasks if I care about code quality/structure/maintainability.

I love coding, it always felt like Legos for adults. Not that Legos aren't also Legos for adults.

But there's no fighting the fact that we won't be writing 99% of the code anymore so I take pleasure in crafting the specs and requirements clearly, that's where I put the effort.

And then to avoid having to babysit the agents to get them to stick to the plan, I built a super robust external orchestrator that forces multiple review and fix rounds until I get the result I want.

I'll be fully open sourcing that soon also https://engine.build

When I work with Claude to plan a feature and then review Claude's implementation, I don't understand the feature as well those I developed without AI assistance. I don't recall details of the feature's behavior as well, even days later. I suspect that this is not surprising to anyone who has studied pedagogy. I've been working on applying some exercises during code review (including self-review of my own AI-assisted code) to improve comprehension and recall (https://bridgekeeper.io/). If this problem resonates with you, I would like to talk.

Well, James, forgive me for being so inquisitive; but during the past few weeks, I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.

Computers read my code, so I don't mind upsetting their feelings.

But why would anyone use AI to write documents or articles? Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts?

I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day.

I don't understand how one even uses "AI to write". Writing is the act of taking something that's been burning in my head for a time and emitting it for others. The LLM doesn't know what's in my head and therefore cannot write it...

I've reserved a time span next month to learn TypeScript. I don't intend to rule out AI entirely during that process. My plan is to read a book from cover to cover, and then write code. I am pretty sure I heard of this method from Mitchell Hashimoto on some podcast. I am exited and scared at the same time, because like OP I've spent a lot of time prompt-coding.

Yesterday I needed to email my landlord about the roof and immediately used chatgpt. This is gonna be it for everything

A counterpoint:

Working in /plan mode bouncing ideas back and forth with the AI, me catching its wrong assumptions, it filling in knowledge gaps with a clear explanation when needed, is very intellectually stimulating and I think is making me a better engineer. The key for me has been to be socratic with the AI, think through everything it is proposing carefully, and don't get hypnotized by its confidence, perfectly structured arguments, etc.

Understand you 100% - thats why I force myself to study maths as a "hobby" at a remote university. Its completly useless these days since I will probably never reach a level where I am better than current frontier models - but it sharpens my own mind, just by doing it. I would compare this to the same principle which applies to physical training - its not essentially required these days anymore to be physical active, still its quite helpfull. It would be dumb to not use it - since it is usefull, but its also dumb to see yourself getting dumber and not doing something against it.

The day AI platforms suffer a massive and prolonged outage, it’ll trigger absolute panic and chaos. In many ways we are sacrificing a part of our creativity and independent thinking, but the reality is there’s hardly any alternative now. In a world moving this fast, choosing not to adapt often means getting left behind.

I'm a data analyst and a bit of a data engineer,which comes with the territory. I maintain some unholy pipelines that I wrote a few years back and they were due for refactoring for a long time. I do the AI-fueled refactoring in the most basic way - paste the code, ask for suggestions, implement the ones that are sensible, ask for clarifications whenever something's new to me. The last part is absolute gold. I've learned so much with the help of AI that I think the more I use it the less I need it, rinse and repeat.

I'm at the other spectrum of what the author feels. I feel smarter and more capable with AI, and I'm actually surprised how helpful it is in my workflow. I still write code by hand but I know way more than I would without it.

Granted, I'm the "accidental programmer in a team that's completely non technical" and AI is simply a senior I'd never have otherwise. YMMV but I think if you use the tool as a more expressive Google search it can be a great companion.

Pure vibe coding is not far from "let's outsource everything", it's just a bit cheaper and more available.

I don't feel this way. I have just been tackling more and larger problems, I think? This week one of many things for example is switching a multi-master KV store for tracking views on individual objects to tiered hyperloglogs that periodically merge. I could do this without AI, but it would take me a week instead of a day.

I think, if you're not feeling challenged, you're probably just doing the same work but faster. You should try to tackle harder problems, too!

I'm worse at producing code by hand, but feel smarter overall.

I've learned an insane amount in a very short period of time, and have been engaging in much more challenging problems.

Instead of "what's the right syntax for this for loop again?" I'm asking "what's the business critical module in this system and how do I structure the test suite to prove it's working to spec?"

> I just caught myself about to copy and paste it into Claude to see what it thinks because I'm worried that it doesn't make sense or it reads funny or there's something missing

I unironically believe this is a very good habit. When it comes to writing, instead of starting with AI, finish a chapter by hand first then ask AI to review it strikes the best balance.

> before computer science was a profession, it was physicists and mathematicians and academics who programmed. Professionals. The professionalism has faded away as demand for software developers skyrocketed.

This is revisionist nonsense.

Programmers used to be cowboys, by and large, outside a handful of critical domains. Systematic use of code review, automated tests, source control and so on are relatively new.

What was different is an entire program could fit in one person's head. The stack of abstractions wasn't nearly as deep, necessarily, since you couldn't afford the cost in memory and CPU.

That delivered a different kind of intellectual control, a kind that is exceedingly rare nowadays outside hobby projects.

Has anyone gone back to doing code katas, code craft like exercises by hand? They help keep me grounded.

Also I feel like it’s fine to let AI write your code. I felt very much like the OP did. A couple of things help keep my sanity. one is that as developers I think our job has evolved to knowing what decision an AI makes is good and which one is bad, this can be code or design – but there is nowhere a developer(or for that matter a knowledge worker) can hide from ai. In this world you will be forced to communicate with them. Partly because as a community we have decided(for better or worst) that AI should bring non trivial amounts of productivity gains to software development.

The other one is something I want to validate which is for those of us who are mediocre at coding, it might be a gift because it would free up some time and thus mind space to consider what we are actually good at.

To me it really depends on how I'm using it. Sometimes it makes me feel smart, I'm solving problems I wouldn't have been able to solve before, and I'm learning a lot. And sometimes it feels like I've outsourced my thinking and I can just feel myself getting dumber and losing control over the project.

I think it's vital that you keep strict control, and really try to understand what the AI is doing. And especially when you're doing something really complex, even Claude Opus can get lost or lose track of the context, and you need to be paying attention when that happens.

I have been telling people lately that I feel like I'm losing my mind. And I'm not even someone who has leaned into AI coding that much either; I've just tried to learn the tools since Claude got "good". But my inherent laziness, which was always flattered as something that makes me a good programmer, has made me unable to use the tools with the required discipline. The result is that I have not thought deeply about the software I write for around 3 months. Every additional week that goes by without me doing a refactor or serious feature addition saps my confidence. I know I can still code. But I feel worried that I can't. Today I am refactoring a 4k LOC AI-written rust codebase. I don't know rust, but I will finally learn it today. And I can already tell the end result will be 50% the size and immeasurably more coherent.

It converts ICs into project managers, by default. I've been wrestling with this issue for a year.

I find that a good way to battle this is to realize its not either the dev or the AI that should be coding at a given time. People needs to transform their workflow so the codes alongside themselves.

I am try to be coding at all times on complex issues while I am offloading a boring, non architecture, boiler plate heavye etc. task to it in the background in a git worktree.

I ask it to work in small iterations and commit every step of the way. After my coding session is done I can go back and review it's code.

Since I've never touched AI except for google search results I feel like I'm in a sci-fi show like Pluribus

I have a nice balance of using AI at work as a C#/TS developer which allows me to get stuff done and working on personal projects at home using AI purely for ideas when I'm stuck or not able to figure something out myself.

I personally think it can be a great tool for learning but it's so easy to fall into the trap of getting AI to do everything for you.

I've also used it for personal projects like a Chip8 emulator I wrote in C where I'd managed to run a few basic games and ran out of steam. Used AI to help me implement the rest.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You can use AI in ways that don’t rot your brain. You can delegate easy tasks to the AI to save time, while saving the harder tasks for yourself. Or you can treat it more as a mentor / tutor and have it explain why it made certain decisions.

I find that AI fails at things that are truly creative. I have been thoroughly unimpressed with ideas it has had or things it’s written for me. There’s still a lot of room for human creativity.

I only really use GH CoPilot and while it’s really damn good at predicting what I’ll do next, I find it really makes me lazier. It’s like using GPS - it’s much faster, easier, accurate, and reliable than not using it, but I have found I don’t remember routes like I used to, as if that part of my brain just stopped working. If we don’t use a skill, our brains seem to want to almost immediately reclaim those resources for something else.

I believe your words should be your own. I refuse to let ai strip my words of their idiosyncrasy. I refuse to put my words into a machine that robs them of their humanity. They are mine, they are me. Working with a human editor is an act of love and creation. Working with an AI editor is an act of mediocrity and sacrificed originality.

"That's the self-doubt that it's feeding on and what I need to fight back."

Yes -- now let's talk about the correct form of fighting back.

It is not "I don't want to feel self-doubt so I will suppress that feeling."

It is, "The self-doubt is valuable -- it's pushing me to improve."

The AI is never going to be able to say what you really mean. But it may inspire you to push harder to improve your ability to do that.

Relatable! Or at least making me feel dumb (at times). Things that help me feel smarter are

* actually writing more on my own - created a personal blog just to get myself to write more

* upleveling my thinking - think more about problems and framing

* leverage my experience - guide (or sometimes force) the AI assistant to leverage my experience to avoid problems

* learning new things - rather than let AI just replace things I can do, I use AI to help me learn new things/technology faster than I would have pre-AI

We'll just move to a higher level of abstraction; thinking will be like efficiently coding in assembly, no longer necessary in today's world.

Is it tho? I get paid more these days to write less code. Is it dumb to be paid more/do more, have more oversight and deal less with the minutia?

Im still concerned enough about the specifics to show concern about background refresh tokens silently failing in OAuth in a mission critical real-time system.

Im not coding it, but im still thinking it. That's the important part, ain't it? Is it dumb or just clever delegation?

You haven't written a line of code in 2 years and you're confused why its making you feel like you can't code?

it’s crazy, we’re at a point where I commit code I haven’t seen, reviewed by another AI, followed up to by another AI and it’s just kind of scary.

This thing will explode in our faces sooner or later. Also makes me feel like an imposter rather than an engineer.

Maybe that’s actually what I have become.

Most people who say this didn't/can't happen to them, are the worst cases...

Ask AI how to make you smarter and use some discernment on if the suggestions would accomplish the goal or look up human-written articles on how to use AI to enhance intelligence

I’m still the same smart person when using AI. What the author probably means is their memory of syntax is fading. Bothered?

Slightly different take here. I'm not coding less, I'm just coding the harness instead of the product. Most of my time goes into AGENTS.md, hooks, sub-agents, verification loops to keep the agent from going off. https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/ describes pretty much what I do all day now.

You are doing this to yourself.

I definitely double guess everything I do without it. The doubt creeps in fastest on the stuff I used to do without thinking.

I agree 100% with this article.

You need to spend time on coding without agents and writing without AI as practice if nothing else.

You should not get complacent in offloading all detail oriented work to agents.

I enjoy using and orchestrating agents a lot to build software, but have never really had the desire to replace my writing with LLMs. I don't write a whole whole lot, so maybe I just don't have enough writing to do to make it appealing, but my emails, blog posts, comments, whatever are the last thing I want to automate. Not only because it's less personal, but because I'm so tired of reading AI cruft myself. So much more text in tickets than there needs to be, for example.

And how are people forgetting to code by using LLMs? Do they just mean they forgot the syntax of a particular language? Or forgot how to architect features or how the development lifecycle works?

I've mostly used LLMs to build more complex things that would have been a lot to manage previously, or to build something completely new and learn how it works. I feel like I've only become a better engineer (and programmer too) because of LLMs.

I feel your pain.

Today I'm forcing myself to learn SwiftUI and type each character with my hands, there is a part of me asking "Why are you wasting your time instead of prompting it and getting the UI you want in minutes?". Well, even I use AI I must know the domain I'm operating in to create good products instead of useless slop. Even though I've been coding for 20 years now, I still need to be humble to grown in anything new. I can vibecode full apps but I'm not gonna pretend that my experience isn't playing a massive role in guiding the models.

Don't let AI take away your joy for building stuff, it's totally fine not being "productive" and taking your time. Just force yourself to have, at least, 2 AI days off every week.