God Damn AI is making me dumb

14 May, 2026

It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself.

I didn't necessarily feel I was bad at writing. I used to be a somewhat talented...well...mediocre software developer, but now, the more I use AI, the more I can feel my own skills getting worse.

I think the problem feeds on my self-doubt, my imposter syndrome, that I can actually produce the work. However, when I use AI to write, I read it back and think: God damn, this just looks like AI. It doesn't sound or look like me at all. It doesn't say what I want it to say.

With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code. I have mostly forgotten how to code, which I find very sad and depressing because coding used to be my life. I'm now teaching myself how to code by hand again.

I'm pretty certain that the skills of software development aren't going to entirely disappear with AI. There still need to be people who know how to read and write code. It will be fewer people but certainly there will be people needed.

I'm hoping AI might reverse a trend that's been happening over the past 20-30 years, where there's been more demand than supply of software developers. As Robert Martin (Uncle Bob) lectures; before computer science was a profession, it was physicists and mathematicians and academics who programmed. Professionals. The professionalism has faded away as demand for software developers skyrocketed.

This article isn't written with AI but I just caught myself about to copy and paste it into Claude to see what it thinks because I'm worried that it doesn't make sense or it reads funny or there's something missing. That's the self-doubt that it's feeding on and what I need to fight back.