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 ItAI-generated 847 lines in 12 minutes felt like god mode. But the review took longer than writing it would have. A deep dive into vibe coding, the hidden cost of AI-first development, and why I’m sticking with the terminal + AI pair programming.
Are We Still Developers? The Hidden Cost of Vibe CodingHow I’m staying relevant as a developer in the AI era. Practical habits: writing code by hand, being visible, leading AI agents, keeping a dev journal, automating planning, and taking breaks to skate.
What I’m Doing to Not Become IrrelevantAI agents are shipping code while developers sleep. The job is changing—we are becoming task organizers, configuration engineers, and quality evaluators. How much can we trust AI before our caution becomes a liability? A personal reflection on skill atrophy, the prompt-and-trust workflow, and what it means to be a developer in 2026.
The Developer Identity Crisis
