# I Let AI Replace Me for a Week as a (Kinda Junior) AI Engineer 😅 > Source: > Published: 2026-05-27 03:05:58+00:00 I recently tried using only ChatGPT + Claudefor most of my day-to-day work as someone buildingRAG/chatbot systems, APIs, debugging random issues, and doing way too much prompt engineering. Short answer? **AI did not replace me.** But it definitely made me faster. Also… it occasionally made me question reality. Everywhere online, I keep seeing: “AI will replace engineers.” And then the other side saying: “AI is useless.” Meanwhile, I’m sitting there building chatbot/RAG projects thinking: “Okay but… what actually happens if I seriously try this?” So for a week, I decided to do something simple: Before doing anything myself, ask AI first. Not blindly copy-paste. Just genuinely try using it as much as possible. My setup was pretty simple: No fancy agent workflow. No 12-monitor productivity setup. Just me, AI, and a questionable amount of debugging. I gave AI permission to help with: ✅ RAG / chatbot development ✅ API/backend coding ✅ Debugging ✅ Prompt engineering ✅ Documentation ✅ Resume/portfolio improvements ✅ Random “why is this not working” moments But I refused to let AI do: ❌ Production decisions ❌ Blind copy-pasting into production ❌ Anything security-related without checking ❌ Thinking for me That last one became important later. Very important. I’m not gonna lie. Day 1 felt amazing. I started throwing everything into ChatGPT and Claude. Things like: And suddenly… Stuff that normally took me **30–40 minutes** sometimes got solved in **5 minutes**. It honestly felt like: pair programming with someone ridiculously smart… who occasionally forgets reality. Or like: having an intern who somehow read the entire internet overnight but still needs supervision. For example: I had one annoying API issue that would've normally taken me forever to debug. AI didn't instantly solve it. But it pointed me toward the exact place I was messing up. That alone saved me a lot of pain. This was where I started understanding why engineers are obsessed with AI tools. Not perfect. But definitely better. Normally my debugging process looks like this: ``` Google Stack Overflow Random GitHub issue YouTube video Confusion Existential crisis Finally fix bug ``` With ChatGPT + Claude it became: ``` Paste error Get possible causes Test solutions Fix faster Still confused but slightly happier ``` Huge improvement. Especially for weird backend issues. Since I’ve been working on chatbot/RAG stuff recently, I started using AI to improve prompts. Instead of asking: “Write a prompt.” I started asking: “Why is this prompt failing?” or “How would you redesign this for better responses?” This helped way more than I expected. Turns out: Good prompting is less about magic words and more about clarity. Which sounds obvious… But I definitely learned it the hard way 😅 I’ll be honest. I hate writing documentation. Probably more than debugging. Before AI: ``` “I’ll write docs later.” ``` Later never came. After AI: I would dump messy notes into ChatGPT and say: “Make this readable.” And suddenly I had something decent. Honestly one of my favorite use cases. This one surprised me. I recently spent time updating my portfolio/resume, and AI became weirdly helpful. Not for lying. Not for buzzwords. But for: Because apparently: “Built cool AI thing” is not recruiter-friendly language. Who knew 😭 This is where things got interesting. I gave AI a more complicated engineering problem related to backend logic. At first glance? Everything looked great. The explanation sounded smart. The code looked clean. The confidence level? **10/10** The actual solution? More like… **4/10** After testing it properly: The logic was wrong. Not obviously broken. Which is actually worse. Because bad code that crashes is easier to catch. Bad code that *looks correct*? That’s dangerous. This was my biggest realization: AI is dangerously useful. Useful enough that you trust it. Dangerous enough that you absolutely shouldn’t trust it blindly. This was the biggest mindset shift for me. At first I treated AI like: “Do this work for me.” That worked sometimes. But better results came when I switched to: “Think through this with me.” Instead of: “Build this.” I started asking: “What edge cases am I missing?” “Why might this architecture fail?” “What are better alternatives?” “Challenge my approach.” And weirdly… The responses got much better. This stopped feeling like replacement. And started feeling like: having an extremely fast collaborator. One who occasionally hallucinates. But still useful 😅 Honestly? Probably my favorite use case. Not always right. But often good enough to save me from wasting an hour. Massive time saver. No debate. Especially for: Sometimes I didn’t even need the answer. Just someone (or something?) to think through the problem with. Way faster than opening: The harder the problem got… The more careful I had to be. AI doesn’t know: And that matters more than people think. This one hurts. Because sometimes AI sounds SO convincing. And then after 40 minutes you realize: “Wait… this makes absolutely no sense.” At the start of the week, I thought the question was: Can AI replace me? By the end, I realized the better question is: Can engineers using AI move faster than engineers ignoring it? And honestly? I think the answer is: Probably yes. Not because AI replaces engineers. But because it removes a lot of repetitive frustration. Especially if you’re still learning (like me). Could ChatGPT + Claude replace me? **No.** Could they make me faster? **100%.** My honest takeaway: AI feels less like replacement and more like a really smart collaborator who occasionally says nonsense with extreme confidence. And learning how to work **with AI** feels like a skill worth developing early. Especially if you're building things in AI already. If you're a developer or engineer: Has AI actually improved your workflow? Or does it just create more problems? Genuinely curious. Drop your experience below 👇