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The internet is full of engineers anxious that AI is eroding their skills. I sat down and honestly audited my own habits. Here’s what I actually found. #
There’s a genre of article I keep running into, and you’ve seen it too. An engineer confesses that AI is rotting their brain. They can’t remember APIs anymore. They reach for the assistant before they think. They wonder, in a worried tone, what all this convenience is costing them.
The worry is everywhere, and it’s not fringe. A recent Nature piece reported that 77% of physicians and 70% of nurses fear losing their skills to over-reliance on AI, and cited early studies suggesting AI-driven “deskilling” is starting to show up in medicine and computer science. Meanwhile the headlines about developers are blunt: engineers forgetting basic APIs, losing the mental models of their own codebases — even as Google says 75% of its new code is now AI-generated.
So I did what the genre demands. I sat down and honestly audited my own habits. I use LLMs every single day — for code, for drafts, for explanations, for thinking things through. If anyone should be showing symptoms, it’s me.