AI is Making Me Stupid

When I first heard of AI and it’s hype I was skeptical. I thought it would be another fad that would fade into obscurity as fast as it has ascended. I messed around with it and asked it a few prompts but was unimpressed, so I left it at that. Then my company asked us developers if we would like to try AI with our coding.

Of course we agreed, there couldn’t be any harm.

I ignored it initially, thinking it would hinder my progress but I ran into an issue that I could not solve and so I turned to AI. It helped resolve the issue and there went my decent in the AI hype.

Any small inconvenience and I was asking it for help. At first, the speed was intoxicating. I could get answers instantly, code snippets generated in seconds, and explanations for concepts I barely understood. It felt like magic. But the more I relied on it, the more I noticed something alarming. I was skipping the struggle.

And the struggle is where the real learning happens. Wrestling with bugs, tracing errors, reading through documentation, and piecing together solutions from multiple sources isn’t just busy work. It’s the process that builds muscle memory, sharpens problem-solving skills, and helps us truly understand the craft.

By outsourcing every inconvenience to AI, I wasn’t learning, I was just consuming. And in tech, consumption without comprehension is a dangerous place to be. It makes you fast today but fragile tomorrow.

So, I’ve decided to change my approach. I’m not cutting out AI altogether it’s too valuable of a tool to ignore but I’m redefining how I use it. Instead of reaching for it as my first move, I’m reserving it as a last resort. First, I’ll attempt to solve the problem myself: read the docs, search forums, try and fail. Only after I’ve exhausted those paths will I turn to AI.

And when I do, I won’t just take the answer at face value. I’ll dig deeper, asking why it works and how I might have arrived at that solution myself. In short, I want AI to be a collaborator, not a crutch.

Because at the end of the day, my value as a developer isn’t in how fast I can copy and paste a solution. It’s in how well I can understand, adapt, and think critically. And that’s something no AI can replace.