--- title: AI Is Making Me Faster. I Don’t Want It to Make Me Worse. description: An essay argues that AI coding assistants boost productivity but risk eroding developers' reasoning skills if used passively, since AI removes thinking rather... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-making-me-faster-i-don-t-want-it-to-make-me-worse--pwmbqymem twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI Is Making Me Faster. I Don’t Want It to Make Me Worse. | daily.dev og:description: An essay argues that AI coding assistants boost productivity but risk eroding developers' reasoning skills if used passively, since AI removes thinking rather... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-making-me-faster-i-don-t-want-it-to-make-me-worse--pwmbqymem og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/pWMBQYmEm.png og:image:alt: AI Is Making Me Faster. I Don’t Want It to Make Me Worse. og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI Is Making Me Faster. I Don’t Want It to Make Me Worse. **[DEV](https://daily.dev/sources/devto)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary An essay argues that AI coding assistants boost productivity but risk eroding developers' reasoning skills if used passively, since AI removes thinking rather than just mechanical work. It offers ten deliberate habits to preserve learning while using AI heavily: predicting bugs before asking AI, requesting explanations before fixes, avoiding immediate copy-paste, using AI as a reviewer rather than author, explaining generated code line by line, keeping some tasks AI-free, asking AI for targeted exercises on weak spots, distinguishing understanding from production ability, not outsourcing architecture decisions too early, and retaining personal responsibility for shipped code. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How can I use AI coding assistants without losing my debugging and problem-solving skills? Use AI deliberately rather than passively: make a prediction about the bug before asking AI, request explanations before fixes, avoid immediately copying generated code, use AI as a code reviewer instead of the author, and periodically complete tasks without any AI assistance. These habits preserve the mental model-building that comes from struggling through problems yourself. _developers balancing speed and skill retention can find more practical workflow habits like this through daily.dev._ ### What is the difference between manual debugging and AI-delegated debugging in terms of learning? Manual debugging, such as tracing an unawaited asynchronous callback inside a forEach loop over 20 minutes, builds a durable mental model of how execution works. Delegated debugging, where you paste a function into an AI model and get a fix in five seconds, increases productivity dramatically but can reduce learning to nearly zero because the friction that forces memory retrieval and reasoning is removed. _anyone weighing speed against understanding when debugging with AI can track similar perspectives via daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [AI Is Making It Too Easy to Avoid Thinking](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-making-it-too-easy-to-avoid-thinking-9vqjbcvmy) · DEV · 9 upvotes · 2 comments - [AI made you faster. It didn’t make you better.](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-made-you-faster-it-didn-t-make-you-better--5y1djgimq) · Atlassian · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI Has Made Me Faster, But Has It Made Me Worse?](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-has-made-me-faster-but-has-it-made-me-worse--m36hbkrur) · ITNEXT · 2 upvotes · 2 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-making-me-faster-i-don-t-want-it-to-make-me-worse--pwmbqymem) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"AI Is Making Me Faster. 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