I’ll be honest: I’ve been a frontend dev for years. I used to pride myself on knowing the weird corners of JavaScript - closures, prototypal inheritance, event loop nuances.
Then Copilot entered my editor.
Today, I barely write Array.reduce from memory. I type a comment like // group users by age and the AI does it. Perfectly. In seconds.
The moment I felt stupid
I pasted an AI-generated function that fetched data with retry logic. It worked. Tests passed. I deployed.
Two days later, a bug appeared: retries happened even on 4xx errors (which should fail immediately). A junior dev on my team spotted it. I hadn’t even read the retry condition carefully.
I realised: I’m not debugging my code anymore. I’m debugging AI-generated code that I don’t fully understand.
So let’s stop pretending
We all use AI now. But are we growing or just getting faster at shipping bugs?
Here’s what I genuinely want to know from this community:
Three real questions (please pick one to answer):
1. What’s the last non-trivial JS concept you had to actually learn (not just prompt) because AI failed you?
For me: AbortController with complex race conditions. AI kept giving me broken examples.
2. If I take away your AI autocomplete for a week, do you think your raw JS skill would feel the same, weaker, or… stronger?
Be honest - no one’s judging (yet).
3. Have you ever caught AI writing code that was confidently wrong in a way a human junior wouldn’t be?
Example: AI using == when === was critical, or mutating props directly in React.
The “big” claim I’ll defend in comments:
“By 2027, the biggest differentiator between senior and mid-level JS devs won’t be framework knowledge - it’ll be the ability to debug, refactor, and secure AI-generated code without introducing new bugs.”
Do you agree? Disagree? Think I’m overreacting?
Let’s make this useful
Upvote if you’ve ever merged AI code that you didn’t 100% understand.
Downvote if you review every AI suggestion line-by-line like it’s a code review from hell.
Then drop a comment with:
- Your most recent “AI saved my day” story
- Or your most recent “AI almost burned production” story
No middle ground. Let’s get loud.
It feels amazing. But last week, something scared me
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