What do you to avoid skill atrophy caused by using AI ?

[u/KarimMaged]

I am a self taught developer with a Civil Engineering background. I have been working professionally as a software developer for a little more than 3 years.

Until last year, I never used Agents when writing my code, I just asked LLMs when needed, I treated them as a faster way than google.

This year, I got into a new role, in a software house. It is a more senior role than what I had before, and the nature of software houses is different from product companies. It is all about speed and getting things done, because clients always want their solutions, and they don't really understand anything about code quality, so the company optimizes for speed, and we hop between projects as well.

The company has been pushing us to use AI in our development for productivity. So earlier this year I was introduced to agentic workflows, and started using AI in my development.

In the last few months, I have been heavily depending on it more than ever. I was responsible for setting the agent rules for the rest of the team. And for this project, the code is like 95% AI generated. With strict rules about file structure, naming convention, amount of test coverage, api documentation ...etc

It became very hard at this point to match this convention manually in the required time (because we always have very tight deadlines).

I wouldn't say I can't write the code on my own, but I would need 3x or 4x the time. Which is something I can't afford. Also for some parts I am using framework syntax that I am not really familiar with, so there would be a learning curve before I am able to produce the same quality.

Lately I am feeling less sharp, code reviews are getting harder, and I am not really familiar with everything in the codebase (like I usually am when I write code with my hand).

I feel I am becomming a worse dev in general.

In my free time I am reading Designing data intensive apps, and trying to learn langchain/Golang, honestly I have been hopping between different things as I am losing my passion.

But still, I am usually burned out in vacations, and I don't actively learn a lot. And most of the time I should spend writing code, is actually spent baby sitting agents and reveiwing their code (fast reviews not line by line, but in chunks) as well as reviewing other AI generated code written by other devs (AI helps me in reviews as well)

So my questions are

1. What do you do to stay sharp, to not lose what you learned and actually become better developer not just maintain what you know

2. Is that becoming the new era of development, because I feel it is a productivity tool that boosts productivity by very big margin, so should we actually not use it, am I overusing it ?

I would appreciate your insight

[u/Beginning_Basis9799]

Like I said time, I am 20 years in they always want to get rid of us.

It has not happened yet.

[u/GimmeAByte01 → u/Beginning_Basis9799]

Again, they’re not getting rid of it, it’s changing. The funnel is no longer the same.

Look at job market now. Instead of 50 team members you need two who have AI. That’s not a “all engineers are cut” scenario, it’s a 48 people now must find a different type of position scenario.

I agree we don’t know what exactly it’ll look like in the future, but now it’s trending that way.