I've been using AI in my developer workflow since Copilot launched in early 2023, from what felt like a slightly upgraded autocomplete, to vibe coding entire apps.
The Good: When AI Actually Makes You Feel Like a Wizard
I'm not a hyperbolic AI influencer, but there are times when AI can make an aspect of coding 10x faster
Boilerplate AI can generate boilerplate faster than I can type "useState", and writing CRUD operations manually feels like choosing to dig holes with a spoon.
Configs AI is great at one-off files, at least for well-documented areas. Save yourself 3 hours of reading docs to set up a config file, now AI can often generate exactly what you need with a little tweaking.
Documentationish Grokking large codebases takes my few brain cells a while to fully comprehend. AI does a decent job at mapping out the core areas, just use it as a rough guide rather than a blueprint.
Coding Buddy Bashing your head against out of date Stack Overflow posts is painful, some problems were only solvable after sleeping on them. Having a chat window nearby to bounce ideas off is a way better experience than googling (this is more an indictment of search than pro-AI)
The Bad: When Your New Assistant Gets a Little Too Helpful
But let's be real—it's not all productivity unicorns and rainbow-colored commit messages.
Confidence Trap AI is confidently wrong about 43% of the time (made up statistic, but feels accurate). It will generate beautiful, syntactically correct code that does absolutely nothing you intended. I've spent hours debugging garbage when trying to save 30 minutes.
Cognitive offloading Perhaps the most insidious thing about working with AI is just how quickly the human brain wants to take the easy path and switch to autopilot. Especially for young engineers, I can only see this having poor outcomes
The Generic Code Problem AI loves generating code that looks like it came from a "Best Practices" blog post circa 2015. Everything is over-engineered, every function is async (even the ones that shouldn't be), and there are more interfaces than a Windows 95 installation.
The Ugly: Existential Crisis Territory
Here's where it gets uncomfortable.
Imposter Syndrome 2.0: Electric Boogaloo "Did I solve this problem, or did AI solve it and I just copy-pasted?" The line between assistance and replacement feels thinner every day. Am I a developer or just a really expensive clipboard?
Reviewing ain't as fun as Writing The more you solve your problems with AI, the more time you spend reviewing code instead of actually writing it. It's harder to enter a flow state, and frankly, its not as fun
Dependency Anxiety What happens when the AI service is down?
Finding a Balance
Here's the conclusions I've come to so far :
AI is a Tool, Not a Replacement Like a really smart linter that can also write code. It's excellent at the tedious stuff, decent at the common stuff, and terrible at the creative, context-heavy stuff that actually defines good software.
Learn to use it There are problems AI is good at, there are problems its bad at. Knowing how to structure prompts and subdivide problems into bitesize chunks is a skill in its own right. Even if models continue improving, I expect this learned understanding of capability to persist
Trust, but Verify Every AI-generated line gets the same scrutiny as code from an eager intern. Code review your digital assistant like your production environment depends on it—because it does.
Use It for Learning, Not Avoiding Learning Instead of "write me a sorting algorithm," try "explain why quicksort is O(n log n) on average." Use AI to understand, not to avoid understanding.
Keep Your Skills Sharp Set aside time for AI-free coding. Make something fun. Remember what it feels like to think through problems without a digital crutch.
The Honest Truth
AI has made me a better developer in some ways and a lazier one in others. It's saved me countless hours of boilerplate hell and introduced me to patterns I wouldn't have discovered.
Software engineering isn't just about writing code. It's about understanding problems, designing solutions, making trade-offs, and caring about the humans who will use what you build. AI can help with some of the coding, but it can't replace every bottleneck.