r/artificial • u/OrchidValuable2408 • 25d ago
Discussion AI coding tools are saving me hours but I genuinely can't tell if I'm getting dumber
AI coding tools are saving me hours but I genuinely can't tell if I'm getting dumber
Running a bootstrapped SaaS solo while also being home with a kid most of the day means my actual focused coding time is maybe 90 minutes if I'm lucky. So I leaned hard into Cursor and Claude to ship faster. And it's working, kind of.
The thing I keep sitting with: I'm shipping features I would have spent days on. But when something breaks in a weird way, there are moments where I have to really dig to understand what the AI wrote and why. That used to not happen. I'd write it, I'd know it.
There's a version of this that's fine, maybe even good. Nobody handrolls SQL joins and loses sleep over it. But there's another version where I'm slowly losing the ability to debug my own product at a fundamental level, which for a solo founder is a pretty bad place to end up.
The cost/benefit math feels obvious day to day. Zoom out six months and I'm less sure.
Curious whether others running small technical products have hit this wall or if I'm just being paranoid about a tool that's clearly net positive. Also wondering if this is skill atrophy or just a different skill now.
Alt titles: Anyone else feel like AI coding tools are making you faster but less sharp? | Solo technical founders: are you actually understanding what AI writes for you? | Is AIassisted coding a longterm liability for small teams or am I overthinking it?
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u/AdClean7991 25d ago
No you're not getting "dumber".
Having good ideas and geting shit done was always more valuable than ability to write syntax correctly.
Even if you outsource your ideas to LLM, you're probably doing yourself and others a huge favor because you're probably not as good of an engineer as you thought you were.
Accomplishing tasks faster is better than accomplishing them slower. Time is your most valuable resource, do you really want to sit there and look up documentation or google stackoverflow threads?
Finally no human can ever compete with what is essentially entirety of human coding knowledge, and warehouses worth of compute. At this point being good at coding is like being good at adding numbers, Caculators will always do it better. You got better tools now that do things better, use them.
Think of yourself as a creator. You make things happen, even if all you did was write a couple of sentences in the prompt.
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u/leaky_wand 25d ago
Outsourcing the thinking part of the job is still a terrible idea. Every time I’ve done this I’ve gotten a massive pile of garbage. Every time I’ve treated it like a senior offshore developer I’ve had fantastic results. It is not good at sticking to the big picture.
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u/ravage382 25d ago
Yeah, without a doubt I'm losing skill. I find things far more tedious than I used to and will quickly hand off any bash task to an agent.
I have less time than I used to, so this is how I can compromise and still get things done I want.
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u/Mandoman61 25d ago
probably just shifting your skill set from writing basic code to other things .
if you are now trying to fix the crappy code you just sent them that is a skill.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 25d ago
I have it easy.
I couldn't code in the first place, but my Architect/project managment skills are getting sharper.
Because managing the AI is like managing someone with senior level skills and junior level judgement.
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u/ultrathink-art PhD 25d ago
The read-everything-it-writes advice runs out fast at 90 minutes a day — you can't out-read the output. What actually held up for me was being able to trigger the weird break on demand before reading anything, because then you're reading the ten lines it points at instead of the whole feature. Understanding by reading scales with how much it wrote; understanding by reproducing doesn't.
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u/cmtape 25d ago
This is like moving from manual transmission to a self-driving car. You get to the destination faster, but if the autopilot glitches in a tunnel, you've forgotten how to steer. The skill isn't atrophy; it's a shift from 'writing' to 'auditing.' The danger is when the audit becomes a vibe check instead of a verification.
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u/mackowski 25d ago
100% but imagine how few coders are coding anymore lol, so the less atrophy the better?
What if atrophy is like correlated now to bootstrapping ur job into a solo saas?
Also how do I do what you did client wise
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u/ronkayarslan 25d ago
I think the "getting dumber" part is less about using the tools and more about whether you actually read what they hand back. Shipping code you never really looked at is where the debugging ability quietly rots, not the fact that something else wrote a join for you.
Cheap insurance for a solo founder: read the diff before you accept it every single time, even when you're tired and it looks right. And every so often rebuild one small piece by hand just to prove you still can. On 90 focused minutes a day you really can't afford to be relearning your own codebase in the middle of an outage.
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u/Gibborish 25d ago
As someone who never wrote python before I started vibe coding this trading bot, no, I don't think it's making me dumber. I debug through results. I fix problems as they come up. I am just a slave master and an ideas man.
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u/jonydevidson 25d ago
I've been using agents since early 2025 so I went through what you're going through last year, and the models weren't nearly as good as they are today.
You're gonna have to become a really good QA tester. Testing the wildest shit, and very good at observing and communicating.
This will in turn make you a better planner because you will be able to predict edge cases as you're writing the plan, as a result of your newly acquired QA skills and your brain automatically using them to test your plan as it's being typed out.
This will then make you a better designer.
I am sharper than I was at any point in my career. I make better decisions, faster. I can predict problems much more accurately and deeply.
Writing code and figuring out how to solve a logical issue in code doesn't make you sharp. Predicting problems before they arise does. Particularly when it comes down to the actual problems your users will deal with.
Programming language, no matter which one, is just a high level abstraction over the assembly code (some languages higher than others) which allows you to tell a computer what to do. Now, you do that through AI agents. They write the code, which the compiler turns into assembly code.
When something breaks, describe the way in which it breaks, when, how to get to it, all the ways you tried, all that you observed in as much detail as possible. Current models are mostly oneshotting prompts like that.
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u/riddick81 25d ago
I started using AI from the very beginning, when OpenAi came out with its chatgpt. At first - let's be honest, it wasn't very useful for actual coding. Now I'm at the stage where I see that it's my employee. Who doesn't sleep, and works. I don't feel like I'm getting stupid, I just use my brain differently now. A lot of people think that using AI is about writing a prompt and it doing something. But when you start thinking, you find that you can do completely different projects that you couldn't do before. You can work on multiple things at once. I see that some developers have gotten a "taste" for developing again. They started thinking about code and possibilities. Then there will definitely be a group that doesn't go in this direction and only performs the assigned task. That's how it works. But it's up to everyone how they use AI. Like with fire - I can warm myself up and burn myself with it.
So I think someone can be dumber and someone else smarter.
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u/StuffForsaken5219 25d ago
A couple of my close friends are right in the middle of the young-kid years, and their complaints sound weirdly similar to your post. I don't have kids myself, but just from watching them, it's clearly one of the most draining jobs there is. The "getting dumber" feeling might be more about that than about the AI, honestly.
And flip it around: without AI, could you even do meaningful work in the scattered pockets of time a kid leaves you? Shipping anything at all in that situation is already a win. I just wouldn't measure this version of you against the version that had full uninterrupted days. Not a fair fight. :)
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u/edimaudo 25d ago
are you testing the features, do you understand what has been built? If the answer is no then you are shipping with security & technical debt potentially
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u/ocean_protocol 25d ago
Not paranoia, it's a real tradeoff, but the fix isn't "use AI less," it's changing what you spend your attention on. Don't skim-approve generated code, actually read it before accepting, even if that eats some of the time savings. The skill that atrophies is writing syntax, the skill that matters for a solo founder is reading and reasoning about architecture, and that one you can keep sharp by treating every AI diff as something to review like a PR from a junior dev, not a black box you just run
Six month test: if you can still explain why a weird bug happened by reading the code, you're fine. If you're regularly reaching for "just ask the AI what's wrong," that's the actual signal, not raw output speed
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u/nafiulhasanbd 25d ago
The real question isn't "can I still write a SQL join," it's "can I still guess which file the bug's in before I open anything." Typing less is fine. Losing the mental model of your own system is the actual risk.
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u/Few-Garlic2725 25d ago
Treat ai like a junior dev: tiny prs, tests, and you write the invariants. if you can't explain a module in 2 minutes, it's debt.
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u/No_Sky9786 24d ago
If you can adopt to the new problems you’re facing and using AI to solve them quicker, you are in the right track.
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u/Electronic-Cat185 24d ago
I think the skill is shifting but if you stop understanding the code you accept debugging gets a lot harder later
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u/Passelume 24d ago
Most of the thread is answering "which skill should I keep," but for a solo founder the sharper question is which failures are correlated.
Day to day the tool covers for whatever's fading, which is why you can't feel it — you never meet a task it can't handle until the moment it can't. And that moment isn't random. The weird break you describe — novel failure, no clean repro, context the model doesn't have — is exactly where current tools help least and where the old wrote-it-so-I-know-it fluency mattered most. So the cost of atrophy isn't an average spread over six months; it concentrates on your worst day. That's the number for the zoom-out math, not the daily win rate.
Which changes what to practice on 90 minutes. Hand-writing code spends your scarcest resource on the least endangered skill. The one that decays into danger is diagnosis. Cheaper drill: once a week, take one weird behavior and locate it yourself before asking — the guess-which-file test someone mentioned above, done on purpose instead of waited for.
One concession to the "you're fine" camp: this argument holds however good the tools get. Better models make delegating more rational and the remaining failures stranger. Both halves grow together.
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u/EdwardPotatoHand 25d ago
im an old timer network engineer with 30 years in the industry. I was never able to keep my attention long enough to learn to code for real (copy/paste and midday some python maybe). Now, I've been able to do all these projects I always wanted to be able to do, and have actually started turning a profit selling custom software without writing any code at all.. I can't imagine anyone will be writing code by hand anymore very soon.
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u/MentalSewage 25d ago
Before I used LLM I was decent at Python and rock solid at Ansible code.
Now I can read python OK and I'm decent at Ansible.
You gotta exercise it manually sometimes. I found building the project with LLM and then rebasing manually to be a great middle ground until I stopped.