Thought - Why your AI Coding assistant is making you a Worse Engineer
After watching junior and senior engineers alike adopt these tools I have come to a controversial conclusion.
In my two decades of building software I have welcomed every productivity tool that came along.
I welcomed IDEs that auto completed my variable names. I welcomed Stack Overflow that saved me hours of debugging. I welcomed Docker that ended the “it works on my machine” era.
But I am not welcoming the current way we use AI coding assistants.
After watching junior and senior engineers alike adopt these tools I have come to a controversial conclusion.
If you are using AI to write your code you are training yourself to be obsolete. If you are using AI to explain code so you can write it yourself you are training yourself to be irreplaceable.
There is a difference between a Tourist and a Local. Generative AI is for Tourists. Assistive AI is for Locals.
The Struggle
To understand why “Prompt and Paste” is dangerous we have to look at how the human brain actually learns a skill.
Learning is not just remembering facts. It is a physical process called Myelination.
When you struggle to solve a novel problem like figuring out why a race condition is happening in your multi threaded code your brain fires a specific neural circuit.
The frustration you feel is actually a chemical signal. That signal tells your body that this circuit is important.
In response your brain wraps that neural circuit in a fatty substance called myelin. This is insulation. It makes the signal travel faster and stronger next time.
The Struggle is the Signal and if you remove the struggle you remove the signal.
When you ask an AI to “write a thread safe queue in Go” and you simply paste the result you have bypassed the biological requirement for learning.
You got the output but you built no myelin. You solved the ticket but you did not upgrade your brain.
You are effectively going to the gym and asking a robot to lift the heavy weights for you. The weights get lifted but your muscles do not grow.
Tourists vs Locals
This brings me to the distinction between how a novice and a master use these tools.
The Tourist
Uses AI to bypass the terrain. They want the destination. They want the working function. They do not care how they got there.
When the AI makes a mistake (and it will) the Tourist is stranded. They do not know the language. They do not know the map. They are helpless without their guide.
For example, they paste a stack trace into the chat copy the code snippet the AI generates and run it. If it fails again they paste the new error. They are debugging by probability not by logic.
Or, they ask for a “React component that handles file uploads” and drop it into their project. When the client asks to change the upload limit or add a progress bar the Tourist freezes because they never understood the code they claimed to write.
The Local
Uses AI to understand the terrain better. They do not ask AI to write the code. They ask AI to explain the context, critique the design, or reveal hidden constraints.
Instead of asking “Fix this bug,” they ask “Why does this race condition occur only under high load?” They use the AI to interrogate the problem space until they understand the root cause themselves.
They don’t ask for “the best code.” They ask for options. “Compare the memory footprint of using a HashMap versus a B-Tree for this specific dataset.” They use the AI to simulate architectural debates, but they make the final decision.
The Local uses the AI to deepen their mental model. Then they close the chat window and write the code themselves. They endure the struggle of implementation because they know that is where the mastery lives.
The Atrophy of Problem Solving
If you rely on generative AI to solve every novel problem you are suffering from Cognitive Atrophy.
I have interviewed engineers recently who can explain high level architecture but crumble when asked to debug a simple loop without their assistant. They have lost the ability to hold complex logic in their working memory because they have outsourced that holding to the LLM.
This makes you a liability. The value of a senior engineer is not the code they type.
It is their intuition.
Intuition is just the sum of thousands of past struggles that successfully built myelin. If you stop struggling you stop building intuition.
Conclusion
Be The Pilot Not The Passenger
I am not saying you should delete your AI tools. I use them every day.
But I use them as a Tutor not a Ghostwriter.
Use AI to explain a new language syntax. Use it to generate test data. Use it to critique your architecture. But never let it steal the struggle of the actual implementation.
Write your own code. Fight with the compiler. Debug the race condition yourself. That pain you feel is not a blocker. It is your brain growing. Do not let an AI rob you of that growth.