May 9, 2026
Ctrl+Alt+Delusion?
I Will Never Use AI to Code
Coder vows to ditch AI forever—and the comments instantly turned into a roast battle
TLDR: A programmer declared they’ll never let AI help them write code, arguing it drains the fun and weakens real skill. Commenters were split between cheering the craft-first stance and mocking it as dramatic, outdated, and way too obsessed with swearing.
A programmer lit a match with “I Will Never Use AI to Code” and the internet did what it does best: turned a personal manifesto into a full-blown comment-section food fight. In the piece, the author says coding isn’t just work—it’s a craft they genuinely love, comparing AI-assisted programming to asking a machine to write your novel for you. Their big fear is simple: if you let a chatbot do the hard parts, you stop building real skill, your judgment gets rusty, and soon you can’t tell good work from polished nonsense.
But wow, the crowd was not quietly nodding along. One of the loudest reactions wasn’t even about AI—it was about the article’s aggressively casual style, with readers calling the swearing distracting, “cringey,” and a bigger turnoff than the actual argument. Others pushed back on the all-or-nothing stance, saying refusing AI outright sounds like a mechanic rejecting power tools on principle. In other words: noble, maybe—but also a little theatrical.
Then came the pro-AI camp, armed with the most relatable defense imaginable: it saves them from boring repetitive typing. One commenter even compared it to upgrading from an old clunky screen to a modern one—less pain, same job. And the joke of the thread? The horse analogy. Yes, someone basically said: people still enjoy horses, but we don’t use them to get places anymore. Brutal, funny, and exactly the kind of line that keeps internet drama alive.
Key Points
- •The article says the author does not plan to use AI for coding and frames this as a deliberate long-term position.
- •The author argues that coding is an activity he personally enjoys, making AI-generated coding unattractive to him.
- •The article claims meaningful skill development comes from direct practice, mistakes, and active problem-solving rather than AI-assisted output.
- •It argues that people who rely on AI in areas where they lack expertise may be unable to judge the quality or accuracy of AI-generated results.
- •The article says that even skilled users risk long-term skill decay if they shift from doing work themselves to mainly supervising AI output.