I used AI more last year than in any year of my career, and got quietly worse at my job. AI skill atrophy is quiet. You only notice when something breaks. The pendulum, and the three habits that keep it swinging.
The Pendulum: How to Use AI Without Losing Your EdgeI approved my own PR and felt nothing. Over-delegating to AI didn’t just make my work fragile — it made it boring. The fix wasn’t using less AI. It was flipping who leads.
Don’t Automate the FunIn 1982 skaters named a trick “the impossible” because the physics said it couldn’t exist. Decades later a 1000fps camera revealed why it can — and what that has to do with your job as a developer.
AI Didn’t Take Your Job – It Revealed ItUsing AI as a researcher, not a brain — a workflow from problem to ship, built around one rule: I do the thinking, AI does the fetching.
I Delegated My Thinking to AI. Now I’m Taking It Back.Today, on the verge of a breakdown, I realized I’ve been in a very toxic relationship for a while now. One that gaslights me. One that nudges me toward decisions…
I’m in a Toxic RelationshipMeta is installing tracking software on its employees’ work computers. Not for security. Not for compliance. For training data. Mouse movements. Keystrokes. Screenshots. All fed into AI models so agents…
We’re Not Being Replaced by AI. We’re Being Asked to Train It.That anxiety you feel scrolling AI threads at 11 PM? It’s not going away. Even engineers building AI daily don’t feel AI literate. Here’s why — and what to do about it.
No Developer Feels AI Literate Right Now — Not Even the Ones Building ItSpec-driven development promises control through living, iterative specifications. But without clear workflows and better tooling, teams keep falling into the same big-design-upfront trap that agile was invented to escape. A practitioner’s honest take on the gap between SDD’s vision and its current reality.
Spec-Driven Development Isn’t Waterfall — But It Keeps Ending Up ThereEvery clean code practice we follow was invented to solve a human problem. But what happens when humans are no longer the primary audience of source code? A senior developer’s honest reckoning with AI-driven development and what it means for the craft.
Clean Code Is Dead (And I Hate That I Agree)New research shows experienced developers are 19% slower with AI tools — but feel 20% faster. I walk through three major studies that prove AI isn’t making us faster, and share the confidence boundary framework for knowing what to delegate and what to keep.
I’ve been producing bad code (because of AI)
