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Navigating a Code-Driven World: Am I cooked if I don’t use AI?
TLDR — No, you’re not cooked. But you’re not faster either
Not long ago, I caught myself writing code that looked polished, passed tests, and technically worked… but felt hollow.
I’ve been building Android apps and writing Kotlin for over seven years now. I’ve shipped features under pressure, refactored legacy codebases, and mentored juniors. So when AI tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT entered the scene, I was quick to adopt them. At first, they felt like superpowers. Boilerplate vanished, patterns completed themselves, and I found myself “moving faster.”
But over time, I started to feel disconnected from my own craft.
I’d review a PR and realize I didn’t fully understand why a certain snippet worked — because AI had helped shape it. I’d troubleshoot a bug and realize I hadn’t seen the code evolve line-by-line like I used to. What I was gaining in speed, I was losing in awareness. And that trade-off started to bother me.
So I made a deliberate decision to scale back. Not because AI is bad — but because I needed to recalibrate.
