A few months ago, I realized I hadn’t written a regex by hand in weeks. Not because I suddenly stopped needing them — but because ChatGPT wrote every single one for me. It worked perfectly. Until it didn’t.
That’s when it hit me: AI wasn’t just helping me — it was quietly dulling my edge.
We love to talk about how AI makes us faster, more productive, and even more creative. But we rarely talk about what it takes away when we stop being intentional about how we use it.
1. Problem Solving → Pattern Matching
AI tools like Copilot or ChatGPT are incredible at recognizing patterns. But they don’t actually think. And when we rely on them too much, neither do we.
You stop debugging. You stop exploring edge cases. You stop asking why something works — because the AI already told you how to fix it.
That’s a dangerous place to be as a developer. The moment you outsource curiosity, you outsource growth.
2. From Learning to Prompting
Remember when learning meant reading docs, experimenting, and breaking things? Now, we just ask the AI and move on.
Sure, you get the answer faster. But you also skip the learning process — the messy, frustrating, but essential part that turns knowledge into intuition.
Prompt-based learning is like using a calculator before learning arithmetic. It gives results, not understanding.
3. Communication & Thought Clarity
AI can write your code comments, your commit messages, even your documentation. Convenient, right?
But if you stop articulating your thoughts, you stop clarifying them. Communication isn’t just for others — it’s how you refine ideas. The less you write and explain, the less you actually understand your own logic.
A developer who can’t explain their reasoning is just a typist with fancy tools.
4. Creativity & Experimentation
AI usually gives you the most probable answer — not the most interesting one.
When you stop tinkering, stop experimenting, and stop trying weird ideas because the AI already gave you the “right” way — you start to lose the playful curiosity that made you a good developer in the first place.
Everyone’s code begins to look the same. Safe. Predictable. Boring.
5. Intuition & Ownership
Ever looked at your codebase and realized you don’t feel connected to it anymore? That’s what happens when too much of it isn’t really yours.
You didn’t design it. You didn’t make the trade-offs. You didn’t debug it at 2AM to understand why it broke.
And because of that, your intuition — that gut feeling about how things should fit together — slowly fades.
6. How to Stay Sharp in an AI-Driven World
AI isn’t the enemy. Mindless use is.
Here’s how to keep your brain (and skills) alive:
- Try before you ask. Solve it yourself first, then compare your answer with the AI’s.
- Practice unplugged. Code a small project or challenge without any AI for a day. It’ll hurt — in a good way.
- Reflect. Track when AI genuinely helps you vs. when it’s just saving you from thinking.
- Teach. The best way to ensure you still understand something is to explain it to someone else.
🧠 The Bottom Line
AI won’t replace developers. But developers who forget how to think might replace themselves.
Use AI like a power tool — something that amplifies your skill, not something that replaces it. Because the most valuable thing about being a developer isn’t knowing what to type. It’s knowing why.
👋
Thanks for reading — I’m Marxon, a web developer exploring how AI reshapes the way we build, manage, and think about technology.
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Let’s keep building — thoughtfully. 🚀
Top comments (11)
NICE one... it hits hard because I feel ive became duller or at least lazier to debug one by one.
but in some cases it really needs my OWN EFFORT to find the correct answer. after consuming more than 70% context some AI tends to be hallucinating and repeat the wrong solution in cycle
Absolutely agree, I’ve noticed the same. Sometimes AI gives a confident wrong answer, and we get stuck trusting it too much.
I like how you put it: it still takes our own effort to debug and verify. That’s exactly where the real learning happens — not in the first result, but in checking why it’s right (or wrong).
Great article!
I still believe it's up to us, developers if we get dumber or smarter. Tools have nothing to do about that, it's all about how we use them. Delegating way too much to AI will definitely make our analytical mind rusty; however AI tools, if used wisely and effectively, can actually make you a smarter engineer than you were before.
When I talk about this stuff, I like to use a car driving analogy. It's like saying automatic gearboxes in cars cause more accidents, as drivers have more freedom to do other stuff like texting or scrolling the social media. However, it's not the car, it's the irresponsible driver that has no idea how to drive the car safely.
Love that analogy, the car one is spot on.
100% agree: it’s not the tools, it’s how we use them. AI can either make us sharper or softer depending on how conscious we are.
I like to think of it as using AI as a copilot, not an autopilot.
I always say this to the gen Z developers "Try before you ask. Solve it yourself first, then compare your answer with the AI’s."
For experienced developers and leads: You can ask AI to write code, but make sure you validate the code is right and well optimized.
I learned so much new awesome things I wouldn't even thought about before thanks to AI in last year. I disagree with the tips. Don't be shy to let AI scaffold the draft of a solution as a first step. The key to stay in game is not just copy-paste the answer blindly, but always think about the proposed code, understand it fully, ask for details and reason about the decisions you find suspicious ("What does this line exactly do?", "Why you used this setting?", etc). Also, having to write the prompt in such a way AI understands the task good enough to spit a working solutuion is ultimately making you a better developer (and thinker).
Knowing all the JDK API methods' signatures by heart is also not making you a better developer (although Oracle exams when I did them used to pretend otherwise). You need to know what is available and how (not) to use it. Best engineers in the world were always googling (and now chatGPT-ing) stuff like "How to center a div?", because their value added was in the fact they knew *WHY * they want to center it. Fill your mind with performance, security, UX, accessibility concerns - those are important. Skills of manually writting a code not that much.
That’s an awesome perspective, and I agree with most of what you said.
I think we’re saying the same thing from different angles: the danger isn’t in using AI, it’s in using it unconsciously.
You’re absolutely right, prompting well, questioning the output, and understanding why the AI chose something are skills in themselves.
My post was more about the moments when we skip those steps entirely.
In short: AI can definitely make us better developers. As long as we stay the ones doing the thinking. 🙌
Nice one. Currently, most clients say that AI can give better results, but they don’t realize that AI can sometimes provide incorrect answers and information. This post is helpful for developers because AI does not replace the work developers do
Totally agree. I think the danger isn’t that AI gives wrong answers — it’s that it gives convincing wrong answers.
Developers who stop questioning the output are the ones who’ll fall behind, not the ones who use AI wisely.
can you give some tips mastering programming without ai
Try to solve problems manually first, even small ones.
Rebuild something you already know without AI, then compare your approach to what AI would suggest.
It’s not about rejecting AI, it’s about keeping your brain in the loop.
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