AI Is Making Me Dumb: A Developer's Confession of Skill Atrophy

James Pain shares a candid personal account of how relying on AI for writing and coding has eroded his skills. After using AI exclusively for coding for one to two years — prompting only, without writing a single line of code himself — he reports that he has mostly forgotten how to code. He finds this "very sad and depressing because coding used to be [his] life."

Key Details

• The author used AI entirely for writing (articles, code, documents) and felt his own writing ability diminishing.
• When he reads AI-generated text, he thinks: "God damn, this just looks like AI. It doesn't sound or look like me at all."
• For coding, he has been using AI entirely for a year or two — prompting only — and now finds he has lost the ability to code manually.
• He is now in the process of teaching himself to code by hand again.
• He connects this to imposter syndrome and self-doubt: the AI feeds on self-doubt, making him second-guess his own work.
• He notes that even while writing this article, he almost copy-pasted it into Claude to check if it "makes sense or reads funny" — recognizing the cycle of dependency.

Broader Observations

• He believes the demand for software developers may decrease as AI takes over, potentially reversing the trend of high demand over the past 20–30 years.
• Referencing Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob), he suggests the profession may return to a more professional, specialized practice — similar to when physicists and mathematicians did the programming before CS was a profession.
• He still thinks people who can read and write code will be needed — just fewer of them.