There was something fulfilling that died within me when I no longer had to debug my code.
I can't tell you the specific date that this feeling began to spread. But there's a growing chorus of experienced developers saying the quiet part out loud: coding isn't fun anymore, and AI might be the reason.
The Thread That Hit a Nerve
A viral thread in a popular senior developer community recently went boom. The premise was simple: “coding doesn't seem fun anymore.” It wasn't burnout cases or junior devs dealing with imposter syndrome in the replies.
These were staff engineers, tech leads, and founders. Individuals who opted for this profession out of passion for the craft. And yet, they were all expressing a similar sense of hollowness.
The "Mentally Lazy" Problem
Here is a recurring theme. Developers who lean heavily on AI assistants report feeling "mentally lazy" — their words, not mine.
It is logical when you give it a second thought. The satisfaction of programming was never really about the output. It came from the process. The moment your brain clicks two concepts together and you see the path forward. That's what gives you a dopamine rush.
AI assistants like this short-circuit the loop. You receive the answer even before your brain completes the question. The code is functioning, the PR is being shipped, and you don't get the ... feeling.
→ The puzzle is solved before you get to enjoy solving it.
→ The "aha moment" gets replaced by a "yeah, that looks right" moment.
→ You become a code reviewer of machine-generated output instead of a creator.
That's not programming. That's middle management using a terminal.
The Corporate Squeeze
Meanwhile, every company on earth is pushing AI adoption like it's oxygen. And the productivity gains are real — I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Products are reaching shelves at faster speeds. Repetitive tasks are being eliminated. New employees are truly able to get up to speed faster on alien projects.
But there's a tension nobody in leadership wants to acknowledge. The same tools that make developers faster are quietly eroding the craftsmanship that made those developers good in the first place.
Experienced engineers developed their intuition by investing countless hours of effort. By analyzing stack traces while it was 2am. Through writing bad code, understanding why it was bad, and rewriting it. You can't shortcut that process and expect the same caliber of engineer on the other side.
→ Companies want 10x productivity now.
→ They're borrowing against the skill development of their team to get it.
→ Nobody's accounting for that debt yet.
The Part Nobody Wants to Say at Work
Here's the reality check. If you tell your manager "AI tools make me feel less skilled and less engaged," you sound like a luddite. You sound like the person who refused to learn Git in 2012.
Therefore, developers remain silent. They operate the tools. They deliver the tickets. And they slowly lose the thing that made them fall in love with this work. 🔇
I don't think the answer is rejecting AI tools entirely. That would be stupid. But I think we need to be honest about the tradeoff instead of pretending it's all upside.
Some days I intentionally close the AI assistant and write code the old way. I do it because I want to re-experience the process of thinking and working out a solution. Because I want to remember what it feels like to think through a problem. To hold the whole system in my head and feel it click into place.
Protect that feeling at all costs.
Where This Leaves Us
The increased productivity with AI coding tools is real. The deskilling is real too. Both can be true at once and it doesn't help to pretend otherwise. The programmers who will do best in the next 10 years are those who use AI intentionally — as a complement not a replacement — while still focusing on the deep problem-solving abilities that no autocomplete can provide.
So here's my question: have you noticed yourself thinking less deeply since you started using AI assistants? And if so, what are you doing about it?
Top comments (1)
I haven’t really been thinking for myself when I’m building things for a while now.
I use Antigravity, AI tools, this and that, and sometimes I realize I’ve forgotten things I used to naturally think about design patterns, data structures, architecture, problem-solving, etc. And then the AI voice in my head comes in: “Why learn all of this when AI can just do it for you?”
And honestly, it pains me.
Every day, subconsciously, there’s this voice reminding me: “Ttomsin, why don’t you just write the code yourself?” But the drive to actually think doesn’t come anymore. It’s almost like I’ve started seeing thinking as something tiring and difficult.
Sometimes I literally force myself to sit down and solve something without AI. Then it becomes uncomfortable. I’ll stand up and go do something else. When I come back, I end up using AI again. Then the same thought comes back. I stand up again. And the cycle continues.
What scares me is that I genuinely want to get back to the way I used to write code.
I keep thinking about this whenever I hear companies talk about AI and productivity. Companies naturally want tools that help them build faster, reduce costs, and make more money. I understand that. But somewhere along the way, the conversation has shifted from “How can AI augment humans?” to “How can AI replace humans?”
And I keep asking myself: What thing would I gain if I can build something that would replace me? What is the gain then? What is the essence of my living?
It feels like having a gun and pointing it at yourself.
And there’s something else I find interesting: the companies building these AI systems are constantly asking how AI can replace developers, designers, analysts, and other workers. But you rarely hear them asking, “Why can’t Claude, Gemini, Groq, DeepSeek, etc. replace me as the CEO of my own company?”
They don't want to be replaced either.
I know this is getting long, but this is genuinely something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I just want to get back to thinking deeply and writing code the way I used to. And the environment around you makes that difficult too. The people you work with use AI, the culture encourages it, and eventually you feel like you’re being inefficient if you don’t use it.
But at the end of the day, it’s still a choice.
I think the way I want to look at AI is more like a library or a tool in my toolbox. Just like we use an image-recognition library to recognize objects in an application, AI should be something I can call upon when it makes sense not something I hand over my entire ability to think to.
Because once the goal shifts from augmenting humans to replacing humans, I think we need to seriously ask who benefits from that replacement and why.
For me, I don’t want AI to take away the part of building that makes me me. I want to use it without losing my ability to think, reason, design, struggle with a problem, get stuck, figure it out, and eventually say:
“I built this.”