AI is making me lazy, what should I do?

[Toranvor]

I’m a web developer with ~5 years of experience, and lately I’ve been relying heavily on AI-assisted programming (mostly Claude Code). The thing is… it’s extremely good. It often writes cleaner, faster solutions than I would, and it’s significantly boosting my productivity.

I catch myself delegating more and more thinking to the AI. Instead of designing the architecture myself, I ask it. Instead of debugging deeply, I paste errors. Instead of recalling knowledge, I prompt. And while the results are great in the short term, I worry I’m slowly making myself… lazy.

It feels like I might be sabotaging my long-term growth. What happens if I lose access to these tools? Or if I’m in an interview? Or if I need to solve something novel without AI? Am I trading competence for convenience?

At the same time, not using AI feels irrational. It clearly makes me more productive, and the industry seems to be moving in this direction. Avoiding it completely almost feels like refusing to use Google years ago.

So I’m stuck between:

Using AI heavily and worrying I’m weakening my skills

Avoiding AI and knowingly reducing my productivity

Are other developers experiencing this? How are you balancing AI usage with maintaining your own skills? Do you set rules for yourself? Or is this just the new normal and I’m overthinking it?

Would really appreciate hearing from people in the same boat.

[Miguel1]

Why use a car / public transportation when you can walk / run?

[OBEler]

@Toranvor It feels like I might be sabotaging my long-term growth. What happens if I lose access to these tools? Or if I’m in an interview? Or if I need to solve something novel without AI? Am I trading competence for convenience?

You don't get it.  You will never loose access to these tools. They will be there forever. 

You will be never in an interview for coding again. This is your last job. Keep it as long as possible.

You don't trade anything. Your competence is obsolete. Your skills are not needed anymore.

[bazera]

22 hours ago, Toranvor said:

Are other developers experiencing this? How are you balancing AI usage with maintaining your own skills? Do you set rules for yourself? Or is this just the new normal and I’m overthinking it?

Yes, me too. I don't have a good answer for that yet.

One thing that you can do it spend at least an hour a day manually doing some solutions for some problems. Doing something 1-2 hours a day that will have some kind of resistance to it, a friction, it will build a skill.

Maybe start a side project that will be a bit more ambitious than usual. But again, I think you should use AI for boilerplate code even for such a project. Don't waste your time on repetitive things. Only do what's hard part manually.

[YIDIRYIDIR]

@Toranvor This would take some trial and error. maybe you can find your answer in history of how people dealt with similar issue with the rise of similar technologies. 

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

Yeah bro, I'm certain these are the kinds of questions and thoughts going throught every white collar person's mind, not just for IT people, so you're not alone in this. We'll just have to wait and see. Brace for the impact the best you can, maybe it'll come early as per optimistic predictions, maybe more pesimistic estimates will be correct, but it'll come. So buckle up lol

[Leo Gura]

Hard to say.

It's like smartphones. They are so useful but also ruin your mind.

Tasting the Devil's honey.

Edited 1 hour ago by Leo Gura

[Inliytened1]

My brother is a teacher and he says school as we know it is pretty much done.  But in terms of my own job I try not to use it unless I need to.  Heck we got through without it before but its like anything else people are gonna forget what it was like before pretty soon.

Edited 2 hours ago by Inliytened1

[bazera]

17 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

My brother is a teacher and he says school as we know it is pretty much done.

Do they have some plans of how to move forward? Like for example how do teachers distinguish actual vs ai generated homework?

[UnbornTao]