A developer's confession: AI tools are eroding the skills that built his career

A software developer writes candidly about the cognitive cost of leaning on AI for writing and coding. After roughly two years of prompting his way through development work without writing a line of code himself, he’s noticed his own abilities atrophying and has started relearning programming by hand. The same pattern shows up in his prose: AI-generated drafts don’t sound like him, and the temptation to outsource feels rooted in imposter syndrome rather than genuine need.

He frames the dependency as a feedback loop where self-doubt drives him to the model, and reliance on the model deepens the doubt. Even while drafting this piece, he caught himself reaching to paste it into Claude for validation.

Looking outward, he speculates that AI could reverse the decades-long expansion of software development as a mass profession, returning it to a smaller, more rigorous craft — echoing Robert Martin’s observation that programming was once the domain of mathematicians and physicists before demand diluted the field. Fewer developers will be needed, he argues, but those who remain will still have to actually know how to read and write code.