--- title: I'm done using AI | daily.dev description: A veteran software engineer with 20 years of experience describes quitting AI-assisted coding after roughly a year of heavy use with tools like Cursor, Zed,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-done-using-ai-vwdc40jl0 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: I'm done using AI | daily.dev og:description: A veteran software engineer with 20 years of experience describes quitting AI-assisted coding after roughly a year of heavy use with tools like Cursor, Zed,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-done-using-ai-vwdc40jl0 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/vwdc40jL0.png og:image:alt: I'm done using AI 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. # I'm done using AI **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 11 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A veteran software engineer with 20 years of experience describes quitting AI-assisted coding after roughly a year of heavy use with tools like Cursor, Zed, and Claude Code. After being able to build entire projects via Claude Code connected to Linear with minimal human editing, the author felt depressed, apathetic, and disconnected from the software being built, describing themselves as reduced to a code reviewer and QA tester. Citing harms to mental health, software quality, and the environment/society from AI's resource usage and training data sourcing, the author announces they are stopping all AI use, for coding and otherwise, and returning to writing code by hand. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 93 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-08-13). **TL;DR:** Reactions are split between empathy for the author's burnout and mental-health concerns and pushback that the problem is misuse of AI (or an underlying personal/mental health issue) rather than AI itself; several suggest a disciplined middle ground of using AI as a reviewer or junior-dev-like collaborator rather than a full replacement. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 45% mixed · 40% skeptical **The case for** - Some find AI genuinely useful as a tireless code reviewer or 'pair' that catches mistakes better than human coworkers did. - A few see agentic coding as analogous to managing junior developers, calling results from frontier models comparable to or better than many human devs they've managed. - One commenter credited an AI chatbot with urging them to seek urgent medical care, crediting it with a good outcome. **The pushback** - Several argue LLMs can't actually learn or grow the way a mentee can, making the 'mentoring' comparison superficial and less rewarding. - Multiple commenters worry that offloading junior-level work to AI will hollow out the pipeline that produces future senior engineers. - Some think the underlying issue is personal/psychological rather than caused by AI itself, framing the author's crisis as burnout or depression misattributed to the tool. - Concern that treating AI chat as a substitute for human connection (friend, therapist, career advisor) is unhealthy and a distinct problem from using AI for coding. - Doubt that care and quality can coexist with AI-driven velocity given business incentives that don't reward either. **By community** - lobsters (mixed): A long, multi-threaded debate weighing whether AI-assisted coding resembles mentoring junior developers, alongside real sympathy for the author's burnout and disagreement over whether AI or societal incentives are to blame. - hackernews (skeptical): Commenters largely push back on the piece, arguing the real problem was overreliance or an underlying personal/mental-health issue rather than AI itself, though a few express similar burnout. **Hottest debate:** Whether working with AI coding agents is meaningfully similar to mentoring junior developers, since LLMs can't learn or grow the way people do. **Open questions** - Can genuine mentorship/growth relationships exist with AI agents that don't retain memory across sessions in the way humans do? - Will commoditizing junior-level coding work via AI eventually eliminate the pipeline that produces future senior engineers? - Is it possible to preserve both software quality/care and development velocity when using AI, given business incentives? **Highlights** > > helping people get better, sometimes very mediocre people, review their code, sometimes very bad code, plan what to do next, essentially do what you would do when using something like Claude Code The similarity is superficial, primarily because the person you are mentoring can learn and grow. Claude can not. Reviewing LLM generated code ultimately does nothing for the future, while reviewing a junior developer's code eventually leads to a new senior developer. > — [hjvt on lobsters · 4 points, 2 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/rfiuko/i_m_done_using_ai#c_t8cnjt) > I don't think that's right at all. If you tell the AI that it made a mistake during a code review you're shouting into the void. Unless it will later pick up exactly what you said in this review for some reason none of the future Codexes or Claudes will remember having this conversation with you. You're not mentoring anyone. At best you are building a corporate knowledgebase but generally people are just giving advice to something with the lifespan of a fruit fly. > — [apromixately on lobsters · 4 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/rfiuko/i_m_done_using_ai#c_n4lekp) > That is a very interesting point. If the work of a junior dev is outsourced to a LLM, are we witnessing a tectonic shift where eventually after a few years there will be no senior devs? While we can scale AI, and build fleets and fleets of junior devs, that agent cannot become a senior dev! If that holds, we will actually witness a radical drop in quality of software produced. Are we trading off quality for quantity? :-O > — [elobdog on lobsters · 1 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/rfiuko/i_m_done_using_ai#c_svltsd) > > [Using AI chat] made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software. [...] [W]riting and coding without AI helped me realize how much I love coding and how using AI was making me a worse programmer and negatively impacting my mental state. I appreciate OP's decision to write this all out so explicitly. > — [mtset on lobsters · 3 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/rfiuko/i_m_done_using_ai#c_m9fncz) > tl;dr Psych issue, he got lazy, detached and depressed. He blames AI for it so decided to set it aside. If I were to guess his depression is due to something physical (my belief is that it always is) and all AI did was to allow him to be productive a employee despite deepening depression slash burnout. > — [scotty79 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277525) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/rfiuko/i_m_done_using_ai) · 80 points · 58 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49268214) · 19 points · 35 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [“I started to lose my ability to code”: developers grapple with the real cost of AI programming tools](https://daily.dev/posts/i-started-to-lose-my-ability-to-code-developers-grapple-with-the-real-cost-of-ai-programming-tool-2ysnnh7pi) · The New Stack · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [Meet the developers rejecting AI](https://daily.dev/posts/meet-the-developers-rejecting-ai-mgfmaufls) · LeadDev · 276 upvotes · 75 comments - [God Damn AI is making me dumb](https://daily.dev/posts/god-damn-ai-is-making-me-dumb-h3krp9yba) · Hacker News · 3 upvotes · 2 comments - [I feel lost on AI](https://daily.dev/posts/i-feel-lost-on-ai-plkcmj7ei) · DEV · 289 upvotes · 30 comments --- Tags: [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code), [#vibe-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/vibe-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-done-using-ai-vwdc40jl0) ```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":"I'm done using AI","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-done-using-ai-vwdc40jl0","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-done-using-ai-vwdc40jl0"},"datePublished":"2026-08-12T16:24:05.515Z","dateModified":"2026-08-13T01:16:55.584Z","description":"A veteran software engineer with 20 years of experience describes quitting AI-assisted coding after roughly a year of heavy use with tools like Cursor, Zed,...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/24c39271a49059c6d64c91f3420b5ba4?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/24c39271a49059c6d64c91f3420b5ba4?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Lobsters","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Lobsters","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--tl8v_Fku--/f_auto,t_logo/v1698841318/logos/lobste.jpg","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-done-using-ai-vwdc40jl0","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"ai-coding,claude-code,vibe-coding","timeRequired":"PT11M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Lobsters","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"I'm done using AI"}]} ```