Why VSCode Still Makes Me Feel Alive

Every time I open Cursor or Antigravity to write code or run codex, claude, grok.
I feel dumb.

Not immediately. But somewhere in the loop prompt, accept, read the diff, push I notice I've stopped thinking. I'm just shipping. Reading code someone else's model wrote, watching reels while it "thinks," accepting suggestions, pushing. Repeat. My brain is on autopilot and I'm just the guy clicking accept.

Then I open plain VSCode. No Copilot, no Cursor, no AI anything. Just me, a blank file, and the problem.

And immediately I feel alive.

It's like my brain took something. Not a drug more like it finally woke up. I have to actually hold the problem in my head. Think through the data flow before I type it. Remember the syntax instead of glancing at a suggestion and pattern-matching whether it looks right. Every line is a decision I made, not a decision I approved.

That's the difference. With AI tools, I'm a reviewer. Without them, I'm the engineer.

I'm not saying ditch AI coding tools that would be stupid at this point obvisiously, they're too useful and too fast. But I've started noticing what they quietly take from me if I let them do everything: the muscle of actually thinking in code. The kind of thinking you only build by struggling through a bug for twenty minutes with no autocomplete whispering the answer.

So now I try to write parts of the code myself. On purpose. Not because it's faster it's not. But because it's the only way I stay sharp enough to know when the AI is wrong, when the suggestion is subtly broken, when the clean generated function is actually solving the wrong problem.

Sometimes the slower way is the only way that keeps you in the game when you don't have a deadline or you could grind leetcode or neetcode problems in your free time to keep your brain active.