AI killed my coding brain but I’m rebuilding it
We sprinted into the AI age of autocomplete IDEs now we’re waking up wondering why we forgot how to write a for-loop.
Introduction: how I forgot how to code
You ever stare at your screen and suddenly forget how a for-loop works?
Same. Specifically, Lua’s for-loop. I was on a new machine, hadn’t signed into Copilot, and just sat there like a deer in a syntax-shaped headlight.
“for k, j in… wait… is it pairs? ipairs? What is Lua?”
That’s when it hit me: AI tools like Copilot, Cursor, and CodeWhisperer have slowly numbed our fingers. We’re coding faster than ever before but we’re also thinking less. Repeating prompts like rituals. Accepting autocomplete like gospel. Forgetting why the code works and just being glad it does.
And I’m not the only one. Scroll dev Twitter or Reddit and you’ll see post after post:
“Ever since I started using AI, I feel like I’ve lost my ability to code without it.”
It’s not just dramatic. It’s happening. We’re creating a generation of devs who ship fast, but can’t explain why the code runs.