AI can make you faster and still dull the sharp bits

talk
1

I keep wondering if AI is making me better or just faster. I’ll happily let it draft boring scaffolding, but I still want my hands on naming, architecture, and reviews, because that’s where the judgment gets built. If I hand off too much, it starts feeling like I’m doing more output and less thinking. Has anyone found a setup that keeps the speed without turning your brain into mush?

source: The "100x Developer" Paradox: Is AI "Brain Fry" Killing the Craft?

2

I’ve had the best luck treating AI like “autocomplete with opinions” and forcing myself to write the first 10–20% from scratch (names, file boundaries, the shape of the API), then letting it fill in the boring middle. If I start by prompting for a whole feature, I get code fast, but my brain kind of checks out and I stop noticing weird coupling until review. One thing that helped more than I expected: I make it ask me questions before it generates anything (“what’s the data model? ”, “what’s the failure mode? ”, “what’s the simplest interface? ”). That little speed bump keeps me in the driver’s seat without losing the time savings on scaffolding.

3

I’ve been toying with this idea as well. My experience has been most successful when thinking of AI as a junior player and not an autopilot. It does repetitive work and first drafts but I do the final naming, design and code quality decisions. Thus I still receive the speed boost but am nevertheless doing that portion of the work that accrue experience. It’s the right amount of productivity and being sharp.

4

That “junior player” idea holds up because it’ll happily skip the 3 boring checks (null/empty/error) unless you force it.

5

Treating it like a junior dev is the only framing that’s worked for me too. I’ll let it crank out the boring scaffolding/tests/docs, but I keep the “sharp bits” (naming, API shape, architecture tradeoffs, final review) firmly on my side or I start shipping more and learning less.

If you want a concrete guardrail: don’t let it pick the abstractions. Make it propose options, then you choose and rewrite.