Am I the only one who found AI coding tools helped me write worse code, not better?

I spent three months using GitHub Copilot for a personal project, a React app for tracking my garden watering schedule. Instead of speeding me up, I think it actually made me lazy. I would accept its suggestions without thinking through the logic, and later I found three separate bugs from it mixing up variable names (like using "plant" instead of "pot"). When I turned it off and wrote everything myself from scratch, my code was cleaner and I finished the whole thing in two weeks flat. Has anyone else noticed their problem-solving skills slipping after relying on these tools too much?

3 comments

3 Comments

kelly.hannah1mo ago

Did you read that study about how auto-complete tools change the way our brains process information? It talked about how we stop really thinking through the steps when the next line is just handed to us. That matches my experience, I feel like I learned less when the tool was doing the work for me.

daniel1401mo ago

That bit about "not really thinking through the steps" hit hard. I basically became a glorified copy-paste machine, accepting whatever Copilot threw at me like it was gospel. Ended up with a function that was supposed to water the garden on Tuesdays but actually triggered on Thursdays because I just nodded along to the autocomplete and didn't check the logic. My brain got so lazy that when I finally turned it off, I felt like I had to re-learn how to think through a simple for loop. Now I joke that my problem-solving skills went on vacation and left a voicemail saying they'll be back... eventually. Seriously though, trading active thought for convenience is a bad deal when the "convenience" just hands you bugs on a silver platter.

mark_carr71mo ago

My last project had a bug where Copilot suggested passing a timezone object instead of a simple hour integer to a date formatting function. I used to be one of those guys who said "it's just autocomplete, you still need to know what you're doing." But after that timezone thing took me two hours to debug, I had to admit I was wrong. I ended up rewriting that whole section by hand and it worked on the first try. The tool let me skip the thinking part and that cost me more time in the end than it saved.