AI made me a much faster developer… but did it make me a weaker one?
Just a genuine question for other developers who started coding around the same time as me.
I’ve been coding professionally for around 1.5 years, mostly in startups.
When I started learning, AI was already around, but it wasn’t this.
I remember having to:
- Read documentation for hours
- Beat the shit out of a bug until I understood it
- Search through GitHub issues and Stack Overflow
- Actually understand why something was breaking
- Spend an entire day fixing something that probably looked stupid afterward
Then, gradually, AI coding assistants got much better.
And then came agents.
Suddenly, things changed.
1 week → 1 day
Today, I can take a feature that might have taken me a week before and sometimes deliver it in a day.
I can build things from scratch.
I can jump into an unfamiliar codebase.
I can implement APIs, frontend features, database changes, integrations, debugging fixes, etc.
And honestly, it feels insane how much more I can deliver.
But there's a weird problem.
I feel like I'm stuck somewhere in the middle
I know enough to understand what I want to build.
I know enough to guide the AI.
I know enough to review what it produces.
I can usually tell when something doesn't look right.
But sometimes...
If you completely remove AI from the equation, I feel stuck on things I probably shouldn't be stuck on.
And the stupidest example?
I sometimes don't even want to manually change a color anymore.
😂
I'll literally think:
"Let me just ask the AI to do this."
Instead of spending 10 seconds doing it myself.
The part that worries me
I don't think AI has made me incapable of coding.
If anything, it has allowed me to build far more than I could before.
But I feel like it has weakened some of the struggle that actually builds intuition.
That uncomfortable process of:
"Why the hell is this not working?"
"Let me read the docs again."
"Let me inspect this."
"Oh... THAT'S why."
That process sucks while you're doing it.
But that's also where you learn.
Now, sometimes the process is:
"Why isn't this working?"
paste into AI
"Oh, okay."
fixed
And I move on.
So I'm curious about other developers
Especially people who started their careers around the rise of AI coding tools.
Have you experienced something similar?
Do you feel like AI has:
1. Made you significantly better because you can build and learn faster?
2. Made you dependent on it for things you used to be able to figure out yourself?
3. A bit of both?
I'm not trying to argue that AI is bad or that we should go back to debugging everything manually.
I genuinely want to know how other developers are dealing with this.
How do you make sure AI remains a tool that makes you faster, rather than a crutch that prevents you from getting better?
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