AI Slowly Degrades Your Skills
How To Fight Against It
It is really easy to default to AI coding today.
All the IDEs have built-in tab completions and chat interfaces to discuss the codebase with AI. Some others were built around AI coding entirely. You don’t even need a text editor anymore, just a chat interface, and AI will edit all the code files for you.
Vibecoding is a hot topic today, and people have started to use it even in their work or production code.
But where does it lead?
If you tried AI coding, you probably noticed that it is really hard to go back. You actually need to think again. Humans are lazy. We don’t want to think anymore. It’s so comfortable to “prompt code” and note “problem solve code”.
And whenever you must go back to general coding, it feels so painful. We got addicted to AI, and we have withdrawal symptoms without it. It’s like going to the toilet without your phone. You cannot poop if you don’t scroll TikTok.
I need to use the documentation even for the basic syntax. I could maybe code a basic for loop, but I don’t trust my brain anymore. AI degraded my skills, so it’s time to do something.
I wrote a post about slowing down, but it is really hard to slow down today. Here is what I plan to do
How to fight against AI degrading our skills
No AI coding sessions
In the morning, work on a project without AI. Switch off tab completion, no AI chat, or for hard mode, switch on airplane mode. That’s elite-level OG coding. Force yourself not to use AI.
You must understand your code, and it forces you to problem-solve again. This makes coding fun again.
Start small, build hobby projects, read the documentation, or even Stack Overflow. (Yes, that site still exists.) You almost need to relearn coding.
Coding challenges without AI
If you don’t want to start an entire hobby project, just go to a challenge site like HackerRank or LeetCode. These are great sites for quick practice problems where you can get back into the habit of no AI coding.
You don’t even need to change your regular coding environment to switch off AI. Their built-in coding editor works perfectly for Non-AI practice.
I just found Advent of Code, and I will try to solve the challenges myself to learn.
Type out the AI response
This is the middle ground. Using AI, but no copy-paste allowed.
Pasting AI output without reading it is the real problem. If you type it out, you force yourself to read it, and while typing, you can understand the code. It’s not problem solving, but at least the code understanding part is there.
If you only listen to English podcasts and read in English, your speaking will not develop. Same with coding. You actually need to “problem-solve code” to develop real skills. But understanding is still better than nothing.