I noticed something last year. The imposter syndrome posts disappeared.
Not gradually. They were everywhere — "I've been coding for three years and I still Google how to center a div," "just got promoted to senior and I have no idea what I'm doing," threads with thousands of likes, people in the replies saying me too, me too, me too. Then the LLMs arrived, and the posts stopped. I thought maybe the tools cured it. That we'd finally found the thing that made everyone feel competent.
I was wrong. The feeling didn't go away. It just changed shape.
The old imposter syndrome had a specific texture. You knew what you didn't know. You couldn't center a div, you'd never touched Kubernetes, you were faking it in standups about GraphQL. The gap was legible. You could name it, study it, fill it. That legibility is what made the posts shareable. "I don't know X" is a sentence you can say out loud.
The new version is harder to name. You shipped the feature. The tests pass. Your manager is happy. But when someone asks you to walk through the implementation, something is off. You can narrate what the code does. You can't always explain why it's structured the way it is, what the model assumed, where it would break under pressure. The code is yours the same way a house is yours when you hired the contractor. You own it. You don't know every decision that went into the walls.
Engineering culture has long tied ownership to authorship. You wrote the code, therefore you understood it. You understood it, therefore you were responsible for it. That chain held for decades. AI broke it — not dramatically, not all at once, but consistently enough that a new kind of doubt has moved in where the old one used to live.
The data is starting to catch up to what developers already feel.
METR previously published a paper which found the use of AI tools caused a 20% slowdown in completing tasks among experienced open-source developers — a finding strange enough that they ran a follow-up study. That follow-up ran into its own problem: developers refusing to participate because they did not wish to work without AI. 30% to 50% of developers told researchers they were choosing not to submit certain tasks because they didn't want to do them without AI.
Read that twice. Not "AI makes me faster." Not even "AI makes me better." Developers who cannot or will not attempt the work without the tool present. That's not productivity. That's dependency.
Luciano Nooijen noticed this before the research did. He used AI tools heavily at work, stopped for a side project, and hit a wall. "I was feeling so stupid because things that used to be instinct became manual, sometimes even cumbersome." The instincts didn't fail slowly. They went quiet.
AI coding tools can make you more productive. They can make you feel more confident. They can also produce developers who don't understand the context behind the code they've written or how to debug it.
Stack Overflow called this "the illusion of expertise." I'd call it something slightly different. It's not that the expertise is fake. It's that the path that usually builds expertise — the struggle, the failure, the iteration — got shortened. When AI generates code without the developer engaging deeply with the implementation, they skip over all of those learning iterations. The developer doesn't struggle with the problem, doesn't try multiple approaches, doesn't experience the failures that build intuition.
The old imposter syndrome was painful but self-correcting. You felt like a fraud, so you studied. You filled the gap. The new version doesn't have an obvious gap to fill. The code shipped. You're a senior developer with a good job and passing tests and no visible evidence that anything is wrong. The doubt is quieter. That's what makes it harder.
We're living in the most empowering time to be a developer. The barrier to building things has never been lower. And yet, I've never felt less sure of my own skills.
That's Pranav Reveendran, writing in December. He's not alone. A 2025 survey by Perceptyx found a "confidence gap" where 71% of employees use AI, but only 35% of individual contributors feel they understand it well enough. The adoption curve went up. The confidence curve didn't follow.
This is what the posts were about, when people still wrote them. Not "do I belong in tech?" but "do I understand what I'm building?" The first question had a community around it. Thousands of replies, conferences, entire career tracks built around addressing it. The second question doesn't have a community yet. It's the thing people say in DMs but not in threads. It's the thing I've heard from developers who've been building for years: I know how to use the tools. I'm not sure I know the work anymore.
I don't think this resolves neatly. The tools aren't going away and the productivity is real and I'm not arguing for anyone to stop using them. I use them. I built most of Foundation's evaluator with AI assistance and I'd do it again.
But I think the silence is worth naming. The imposter syndrome posts didn't stop because the feeling stopped. They stopped because the feeling changed into something that's harder to share. "I don't know how to center a div" is embarrassing but legible. "I shipped a feature I can't fully explain" is a different kind of statement. It implicates the work, not just the person. It's harder to say me too to.
The old imposter syndrome asked: am I good enough?
The new one asks: is the work mine?
That's a harder question. And so far, it's mostly going unasked.
Top comments (3)
I think that happens to most of us when you started a new job. The imposter syndrome
Starting a new job is when it's loudest but the piece is about what happens after it goes quiet. That version is harder to catch.
That is true!