I called AI code helpers a gimmick for a year, now I'm not sure who's right

Kai Allen · 2026-10-17T10:45:04.661451+00:00

Six months ago I watched a coworker in Austin paste a 200 line function into one of these AI code helpers and it spat out a fix in like 15 seconds. I laughed and said it was just autocomplete with a fancy name. Then last month I hit a bug in our billing script that had me stuck for two days, and out of pure frustration I tried the same thing. It found the issue in one try. So here's my problem, one side of me says these tools are great for small stuff but will quietly rot your skills if you lean on them too much. The other side says who cares, if it saves my team 5 hours a week then it's plain dumb not to use it. I've got two guys on my team who won't touch it at all and one who basically lets it write everything now. The middle path feels obvious but in practice it's messy. Where do you all land on this, do you set rules for your team or just let people use it however they want?

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I called AI code helpers a gimmick for a year, now I'm not sure who's right | AI Innovations - Thought Shares