'Am I Cooked?' Techie Reveals 3 Years Of AI Use Has Made Them 'Useless'

A software engineer with three years of experience has admitted to not understanding their own code anymore after becoming dependent on artificial intelligence (AI). In a social media post, the techie said they joined the corporate world straight out of college around the time Large Language Models (LLMs) were becoming popular worldwide.

Since then, they had become reliant on AI for 'pretty much everything'. It started with fixing smaller bugs or basic features, where they could follow the logic but as the magnitude of tasks grew, they started falling behind in understanding.

"All I do is feed requirements into Claude, accept what it spits out, and push. Half the time, I don't even fully understand the architecture or the code it just generated," the techie wrote.

When seniors ask questions about the code, the techie said their 'stomach drops' as they cannot defend or explain the implementation without feeding their comments back into an LLM.

"The bitter irony? I'm even using AI to clean up this post because my brain feels fried. My focus is shot, my critical thinking feels atrophied, and I find myself unable to sit down and read documentation or trace code manually anymore," they said.

"I feel completely useless, fraudulent, and terrifyingly replaceable. If you took away AI tomorrow, I feel like I'd code at the level of a first-semester freshman. Am I cooked? Has anyone else dug themselves into this hole and actually managed to climb back out?"

Check The Post Here:

I'm terrified: 3 YOE as an SDE, completely dependent on AI, and I barely understand my own PRs anymore
by u/urkula_parukula_ in developersIndia

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Social Media Reactions

As the post gained traction, one of the social media users said: "Very normal nowadays. Pressure deadlines are as such that there's little time to understand things." Meanwhile, another added: "Started happening to me also. I scaled back the AI usage. I let it code and write tests, but I verify the code before pushing and creating a PR. Dev testing is always manual with debugging, so I know what the code does."

A third commented: "Your job is not to write code but to deliver features/products a customer is willing to pay for. That has always been the case. Eventually the only metric that matters is the money you save or bring in."

A fourth said: "Cognitive debt is one of the biggest risks with overuse of LLMs. In the last three months, I was contracted at four companies to save their tech products. The issues were the same. Hundreds of bugs & regressions because nobody had any clue what they were writing."