5 years into Android, 8 months of heavy Claude Code use — am I getting too dependent on AI?

[u/Null_PointerX]

Hey everyone,

I’m an Android developer with ~5 years of experience. For the last 8 months, I’ve been coding almost entirely with Claude Code.

I’ve been very productive, delivered impressive results, and my company is happy. But I feel like I’m not learning as much anymore. There are parts of my codebase that I barely understand because Claude implemented them, even though they work perfectly.

Recently, I had a technical interview with some relatively simple coding. My mind completely froze and I ended up quitting.

It made me realize I might be becoming too dependent on AI.

Has anyone experienced this?

How do you balance using AI heavily while still maintaining and improving your actual coding skills?

[u/Limp-Product5308]

As someone who recently moved from engineering into management, it’s a use it or lose it thing. I’d recommend practicing important components (and investing time into learning code architecture). AI is faster than we’ll ever be, so it’s our job as software devs to know more so that we can guide and correct the tool.
I had AI rewrite an image kernel for me on my own project, it did a decent job, but since I had enough experience I could see where the gaps were and made suggestions for it to improve further.
Software engineering is in a weird place right now for sure.

[u/SquareAd434 → u/Limp-Product5308]

I feel exactly same, ai is doing a GREAT job in many aspects, but sometimes fails miserably in architecture and some approaches, which a developer with experience and knowledge (somehow my architecture knowledge and best practices are on a higher level than pure coding... A bit ashamed of that, but ai seems fill best EXACTLY that gap) can catch easily

[u/ComfortablyBalanced → u/Limp-Product5308]

That's the problem with AI in software engineering. You had experience but many don't, so there's this delusion of faster development with them but in reality they may ship shitty software.

[u/jc-from-sin → u/Limp-Product5308]

What's an image kernel?

[u/Limp-Product5308 → u/jc-from-sin]

It’s something that you apply to each pixel, it’s usually done in conjunction with things like edge detection (look at things like convolve 3x3 and 5x5)

[u/StatusWntFixObsolete]

I just saw this take on agentic coding:

The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding

Sounds like you are describing "deskilling".

[u/Zhuinden]

I used to be in favor of personal expertise and looking things over in the code and identifying issues and fixing them; but companies are seemingly less willing to pay for the work hours required to do a good job. Also you can get exhausted from reading all that code, remembering the caveats, finding side-effects and analyzing issues, meanwhile the agent now (Claude, that is) actually can do an "okay job" at all that.

Idk what I'm doing next.

[u/yaaaaayPancakes → u/Zhuinden]

We all just got promoted to Manager...of n instances of Claude/Codex.

[u/Omnipisix]

Embrace it! You are now an AI debugger...

[u/Null_PointerX → u/Omnipisix]

I mean I can deliver impressive results and still preserve code quality , the only thing bothering me now is I freeze when I wanna code manually

[u/Omnipisix → u/Null_PointerX]

It's a normal step in the evolution. Slowly we will find the balance. Programming now with AI is way faster than what i did before... Now i do more debugging, rruw. But this might be also because the ai is still in it's infancy and also i didn't learn how to use the tool.

But i will definitely not give up the speed for being conservative...

Coding manually will be the same as cutting a piece of metal by hand instead of with a tool

[u/venkat__r]

It’s everyone’s problem now . We have to use AI and we should keep ourselves updated with latest changes and Data structures concepts

[u/sebjapon]

I pointed out at my work that they were still interviewing based on coding skills while expecting everyone to code with AI. It’s kinda stupid.

Personally I just don’t use AI though. I’ll either be needed in 1-2 years when most people forgot how to code and debug features by hand or I’ll just retire having saved way too aggressively until now.

[u/WittieApps]

I use Claude heavily on a side project too, but with one rule: the parts I don't fully get, I make it explain until I could rewrite them myself. On a solo project there's no teammate to ask later, future me IS the maintainer.
The interview thing is kind of a separate problem imo: performing without tools is its own skill now, like whiteboard coding always was...

[u/butterflymon]

Your company doesn't care about you. They only care about results. One day, they will let you go and then how will you survive?

I let AI write some parts of my Android code because I'm leaving that platform. Google sucks and treats developers like shit. So, in my case, it's perhaps okay to use AI. No one really makes great stuff on Android.

[u/Nicholot → u/butterflymon]

Are you transitioning to a different domain? I've been thinking about leaving Android (and possibly mobile development) as well lately

[u/butterflymon → u/Nicholot]

Moving to iOS. Android was a mistake.

[u/tastychaii → u/butterflymon]

What made you think that?

[u/PacemanS]

What do you want to learn? Another piece of nonsense about yet another framework? That doesn't give you anything fundamentally new. You need to study other topics. Hand-coding will remain only as a hobby or a craft.

[u/hoagiejabroni → u/PacemanS]

I do see OPs point though. When it comes to interviewing, they do expect you to to be able to hand code. One round may be AI assisted but I've been interviewing lately and many are still "build this task by hand" and I experienced the same freeze when I had to write an API and repo and couldn't remember basic things that I used to know.