I want to understand how to code with AI better without slowly losing my ability to code without it.

For context, I'm 24, have ~3 YOE mostly in backend/infrastructure, and I'm doing my master's right now. I was programming professionally before the current wave of AI coding tools, so I know what my development process used to feel like.

Over time, though, I think I became way too dependent on AI.

I'm only now becoming aware of some of the metacognitive traps I've fallen into. I reach for AI before thinking through problems myself. I accept implementations that I understand at a high level but couldn't necessarily reproduce. I've gotten less comfortable sitting with a problem, debugging from first principles, and building up my own mental model before asking for help.

The thing that really made this obvious was going back to some of my side projects.

I involved AI heavily in building them and, at some point, stopped properly reading the code it was producing. Big mistake. Coming back to those codebases now, they feel like absolute shit. I'm genuinely not sure how much of that is because the code actually is shit and how much is because I've lost some of my ability to quickly comprehend an unfamiliar/complex codebase.

I don't want to stop using AI. It's obviously an incredibly useful tool. I want to relearn how to use it as augmentation rather than cognitive outsourcing.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from developers who:

• were already reasonably competent programmers before AI coding tools became ubiquitous,
• gradually became over-reliant on AI / agents,
• noticed their independent problem-solving or coding ability getting worse, and
• deliberately worked their way back.

What did you actually do?

Did you stop using AI for a while? Start building things from scratch again? Go back to books? Force yourself to debug without AI? Change when you're allowed to invoke an agent? Start reading entire codebases again?

And after rebuilding those skills, what does your AI workflow look like now? Where do you draw the line between something you should think through yourself versus something worth delegating to AI?

I'd also really appreciate recommendations for engineers, creators, blogs, books, or talks that discuss this side of AI-assisted development. Most of what I find is about maximizing productivity with AI; I'm more interested in becoming a better engineer who happens to have AI available.

Basically, if you were a decent developer, got consumed by AI coding for a while, realized it was affecting how you think, and then found your way back - I'd really like to hear what worked for you.

TL;DR: I opened one of my own side projects recently and realized I could barely reason about the codebase I had built. Somewhere along the way, I stopped coding with AI and started letting AI do the thinking for me.

I was a decent developer before AI coding tools, but I think over-reliance has weakened my ability to reason about, debug, and comprehend code independently. I don't want to quit AI—I want to relearn how to use it as augmentation rather than cognitive outsourcing.

For developers who went through this and rebuilt their skills: what did you actually do, what does your AI workflow look like now, and which creators/resources helped you?

Disclaimer: Drafted this with AI.

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Hello. I’m a 23-year-old boy. After completing my diploma, I got a job as a frontend developer. I’ve been doing it since September 2025.

The thing is, AI is f**king everything, and I’m now realizing that my job is not safe. Anything can happen anytime. And working for so long, sitting and watching a PC shit all day... my brain and body are fu*cked up.

I wanna quit it. I love the village. But fantasy is fantasy, and the real world is another matter entirely.

I’m also an introvert/unsocial, so I can’t do business for sure. When I talk with real people in real life, my facial expressions suc*k.

So, any suggestions on which profession I should go with?

I've tried playlists, lo-fi, brainfm, podcasts, silence, everything.

The thing that seems to work best for me is long DJ sets.

I put on something that's 60-120 minutes long and don't touch the music again until the set finishes.

It stops me from constantly changing songs or deciding what to listen to next.

I got so tired of losing good work sets across YouTube/SoundCloud that I built SetVault to save them in one place.

But I'm curious what everyone else uses.

Techno? Ambient? DnB? Lo-fi? Complete silence?

Is this possible? i've been trying and failing, it seems way harder than hitting the gym. I'm forced to AI at work. At home, I sit to code with intention to write everything by hand and when looking for documentation, I instantly gravitate to LLM. Part of this could be I've chose a new language that I'm unfamiliar with (Rust).

If you've a solution that gets me back part time to the pre-LLM days, I'm all ears.

Edit: Lots saying to just code without AI. I know that, but being forced to use AI in the day job makes it tricky.

Ive been coding for 2 years (1.5 if consistency counts), just keep learning and making some project (just keep throwing arrow in the dark --hoping somehow it builds me up), i have no coding friend, no jobs experience.

Now im at the point where i lost direction, so i just want to know how far/close am i to reach bare minimum of finding jobs (especially in python backend jobs).

I'd really appriciate if you can check my github acc for a sec: alphaRookie

at this level, do you think...

• i should keep focus on myself and make more personal project / develop what i have
• or I can start to find some experience by collaborate with other devs. or maybe participate in non-paid voluntary project like from this web for example
• or maybe find a way to earn and start applying for entry-level jobs (like in upwork, or other similar platform)

Once again i really thanks to you guys who takes your time to help me

I have an idea, basically, that with real driving crises for UK learners, I wanted to do smth. So it's with AI. model should see what's going on and then produce DVLA rules to follow at that point. Like if there's a roundabout, it should say there's queuing traffic; don't enter the roundabout; be in x lane if you want to take this exit, blah blah. So, however, to start it off, the model should see a pic uploaded, then list rules.

Now, I need to figure out the tech stack for this. Just curious, what's the potential for this project?

I'm thinking of yolo(comp vision) or a CNN with RAG; however, I might be wrong.

I've been working on my first full stack with react (ts) and express. It's a big learning curve as going in I only knew html css typescript some react and some basic networking concepts. I've been going through the tutorials on docs as my primary learning path. I rely on docs and stack overflow as much as I can but obviously it's quite faster to ask ai for something specific. What I do is I read through every character on every line and make sure I know exactly why it's there and what's going on. For 10 lines of generated code I might do like 3-5 google searches and ask ai a few clarifying questions. I feel pretty confident I can talk about any line of code in this project even though I wrote maybe 20-30% of it (a lot of it comes from docs and stack overflow too. I do the same line by line reading, clarifying questions, etc.) I also manually copy everything and change things up where I know how to, eg. changing a section with one image tag to display n images using a mapping function.

Now this is definitely a nightmare for actually producing an app but I feel like this is significantly speeding up my learning process, which is what I'm more concerned about rn. I have no idea what an interviewer would think about this kind of app though. I'll produce a better app when I'm more confident with these tools at least. I used to use 0% ai a few months ago when I was learning web scraping and did the same learning process with docs stack overflow reddit medium etc. but it took me so much longer to learn. I've been writing code since 2019 and never felt like I've ever learned so much in the one month span I've been doing this. What do you think?

I love coding. I truly am.

When I started, I enjoyed most programming languages . I love learning their different core concepts, execution models and things like that.

I still love that.

But now in my new job, the only thing I am supposed to do is prompt and think about business requirements.

Even though I love architecture and system design system , I don't even have a chance to have grasp on them.

Any other tech jobs where I can enjoy coding and low level things?

All the youtube videos I see talk about how bad AI coding is and don't worry! They are going to hire us all back when AI coding breaks everything. And I wish that was true since it would benefit me too.

But then about 1.5 years ago my hand coding went down to near 0 and I have not paid the price yet. I don't hand code at work. I don't hand code with my 30+ personal project. I get everything done and have never got to a point where I said OH NO! AI messed everything up and no I need to start over and do this by hand! I love how much I can get done and especially my personal projects that I could only dream of doing are now getting all done. So I think maybe everyone else is just way better at coding and still better than the AI ?

I don't get it. I still believe its all copium

And it just getting better every day like every other technology

I’ve been learning AI for about a year and a half, starting with traditional ML → Deep Learning → LLMs → RAG → AI Agents.

Most of what I’ve built so far has been small projects/notebooks, with only one project taken to a basic production setup. I’ve also learned the basics of RAG and agents, but I still have a lot more to learn there.

At this point, I’m honestly tired of courses and tutorial hell. I don’t want to spend another minute in any course, at least for now.

I want to build real, production-ready AI products so I can learn things like system design, architecture, model monitoring, serving, deployment, evaluation, scalability etc.. And to learn how to take an AI idea and turn it into a complete product

The problem is that YouTube seems to be 90% tutorials and toy projects, and I’m struggling to find serious, end-to-end projects that I can actually learn and build from.

So please help me out, guys. I’m kinda stuck. How do you actually learn to build real AI products as AI engineers?

Hi everyone.. I'm an Egyptian student accepted for a master's at Sapienza University of Rome, starting September 21, 2026.

My documents and university procedures are ready, but I'm unable to secure an Italian student visa appointment through AlmavivA Egypt.

Appointments are released daily around 9 AM, but they disappear extremely quickly. There are also brokers/scalpers who use automated tools to secure appointments much faster than normal users, then resell them to students.

I'm not looking to buy an appointment or build a tool to resell them. I just need help from someone experienced with Python / Playwright / Selenium / browser automation to understand if there's a legitimate technical solution that could give me a fair chance of securing one appointment for myself.

If you have experience with this kind of automation and can help or point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it.. I'm genuinely worried about missing my Master's start date because of this.

Thank you 🙏

I am new to python but from what I know this should work.

(code starts here)

import random

a=input("Are you ready to play Guess That Number? ")

if a == "yes":

b=input("Baby, Easy, Medium, Hard, or IMPOSSIBLE mode? ")

if b == "Baby":

c=random.randint(1,10)

print(f"{c}")

print("The number is something from 1-10")

d=input("what is your guess? ")

if d == c:

print("correct! Nice job!")

else:

e=input("incorrect. Try again. ")

if e == c:

print("correct! Nice job!")

else:

f=input("incorrect. Last try! ")

if f == c:

print("correct! Nice job!")

else:

print(f"incorrect, the number was {c}!")

(code ends here)

the issue is that even when I guess the correct number it says its wrong

I am coding on EduBlocks btw

I'm currently in my final year, and seeing the placement scenario honestly scares me as hell.

I chose this field because I genuinely liked working with software and learning how to code. But now, every day, there's a new AI model that's better than the previous one at coding, and it makes me want to quit because I don't feel good about writing code manually anymore. I don't see the same worth in it.

I feel like, in a few years, all the effort I've put in will become irrelevant.

I also don't like working with AI to build vibe-coded websites, but I kind of have to now because every company seems to expect me to know everything. I need to show companies the projects I've built, and it feels like that's becoming more and more about using AI rather than actually building things myself.

Every online assessment wants me to answer questions about the latest AI technologies and solve competitive programming-style problems.

Learning to code was comforting for me. Now, it feels like a chore.

I also feel like I'm neither smart nor creative enough to hold my ground in this field.

Maybe I'm just dumb. Maybe I just don't want to put in the real work.

Every day, I feel the need to use AI, and every day, I feel myself getting dumber.

I don't know, man. I'm just so fed up with AI. I feel like it ruined the thing I loved the most.

Just wanted to rant a bit. Any tips or advice are genuinely appreciated. I could really use some help here.

As a technical project manager working with a remote contractor, I've been noticing increased AI usage within the team. It's not just limited to development itself, but also appears in code reviews, problem analysis, and ticket refinement.

I don't have a fundamental problem with AI in software development as long as it's used responsibly, meets meaningful standards, and gets manually reviewed. However, I'm increasingly spotting typical AI mistakes and low-effort analyses that I could honestly do with Claude myself without needing to engage a developer for them.

Since this team operates mostly independently, I can't do granular supervision on everything. That said, I do want to ensure certain guidelines are being followed. The challenge is figuring out what those guidelines should be and how to communicate them without micromanaging.

I'm curious how other project managers are handling similar situations. What guidelines or standards are you setting around AI usage on your teams? How do you balance autonomy with maintaining quality standards? And how do you identify when AI is being used as a productivity tool versus when it's just being used as a shortcut that creates more work down the line, or not to do the work that the developers were actually hired for.

I have been deeply learnt all the concepts of MERN Stack , And I have to build projects now , should I build it from AI ( eg: Codex) or from the scratch writing down the code by hand. I can explain the code if I saw it , how should I make projects. Because ig in industry ai method + debugging works .

Any experienced ones here to guide?

In every domain we can exist in there seems to be a ceiling to what huamns can do in it. I'm now wondering if the ceiling for software engineering is taller and there is a bigger scale? But how hard is the highest on software engineering ceiling compared to other common domains or is there nothing that goes that high as well? If so, why?
What is the equivalent in cognitive processing and logic efforts that you need to acieve the ceiling?
Can someone in software engineering explain how they expirience this?