I feel like using too much AI is actually hindering my growth.
I'm a Full stack developer who's currently working on React , typescript, python and AWS.
For the past couple of months , I've been using a lot of AI tools - Claude Code, Copilot , cursor , Perplexity.
Because of our project's tight deadlines (3 months of total development time to develop an MVP) , I've relied too heavily on AI tools.
Right now , all I'm doing is - prompting in English , reviewing the code , and hitting the "Keep" button.
The situation has gotten so worse that even though I know what to code , I feel like letting the AI do the work.
Is this bad? I feel like a fraud .
I also feel scared because what if I get laid off and then I have to prepare for interviews? How would I answer then?
I want to hear your thoughts.
I get the same feeling every day, but I think it’s just because we’re not used to it. We were taught that every time a bug occurs, we have to hit our heads hard against it. It was probably the same for previous generations too — they didn’t have Stack Overflow, so they thought reading the documentation every single time was what they were meant to do.
Same boat. One realisation I had- Sometimes you have to use the judgement - when to rely blindly on AI and when to supervise it. I have lost 3 days of work due to overreliance on AI. Since then, I have made it a point to not let AI run the show and use it for mundane tasks only. For serious stuff with deep impact eg. Tech architecture implementation, or db design, I do it old school way only. I use ai only for getting second opinion.
Everyone has to prepare if they laid off so don’t worry about preparing you are going to learn from preparing and you are not laid off yet, so keep improving your code quality too AI also available for code review and code quality so you can manage so, if you freelancing project like showcase your code base I can help to review it. Better you be more positive. This world is total fraud unless no one see your fraud it’s not a fraud it’s a smart move “. Keep it in mind and best of luck buddy
Were you able to do incremental development fix. is your code getting reviewed by peers and appreciated?
The issue is , our team only has 2 full stack developers. I send my PR to my coworker/fellow full stack developer , he doesn't even bother to review it. Just approves and merges it. And I do the same with his PR's
Our tech leads don't check our code at all.
I can feel it. Whenever I get time or on weekends, I am trying to rewrite some files by myself. Also I'm solving some coding problems - at least to keep my cognitive ability well.
Try that.
Ask someone to review your PR explicitly, recently I pushed code written by AI, tech lead added comments - which I thought was a good code. So this may help.
I used to get this feeling when I was 9 years old and I used to use my father’s calculator to do my homework which consisted of boring multiplication and division questions.
Also in interviews you will never be asked the exact code, they will give you a problem and ask you for a general structure of the solution. By now you would be having a general idea of the solution to multiple types of problems. So you will have no problem dealing with interviews if you have been using AI regularly.
Same thought and you know what I joined industry last year only and since then I have been using AI at least people who are in industry since a lot of time know how to survive without AI what about new hires like us who are so dependent on it that they can’t function without AI at least I can’t
Are you understanding the code it is generating? Copilot/Claude has helped me come up with tons of code. It has cut down the time that I take to research, design, structure and implement code. But I spend a lot of time in reading the generated code. The generated code is mostly fine, but it is fairly easy to skip some context and have the code not work.
I spend my time in generating unit test cases, integration tests and building solid guardrails around the code.
If I have to take a parallel from the aviation industry, modern aircrafts are perfectly capable of cruising, navigating and in good conditions even landing. The pilot only does a take-off. They’re paid a lot of money for their decision making ability and planning. Which is what you should do and let copilot do the actual flying 😛
Every technology disruption relieves the mankind of previous skillsets and helps evolve towards next level of skillsets. Eg: when calculators came by, we had to evolve from being fast counting machines ourselves and evolve towards building computational engines that power large industries. Maybe LLMs are here to push us to evolve towards better mental frameworks - both as job seekers as well as job providers.
(My $0.02)
