May 14, 2026
Prompt, panic, repeat
God Damn AI is making me dumb
One coder says AI ate his brain — and the comments turned it into a therapy session
TLDR: One developer says relying on AI so heavily has left him feeling less capable and less confident, to the point that he’s relearning old skills by hand. Commenters were split between sympathy, mockery, and a bigger argument over whether AI is making people weaker or simply moving work to a new level.
A programmer’s raw confession that artificial intelligence has made him feel worse at writing, worse at coding, and way more doubtful of himself sparked a comment section that was equal parts support group, roast battle, and workplace flex contest. His big fear? The more he lets AI do the work, the more his own voice disappears — and now even a personal essay about that fear almost got sent to an AI chatbot for approval. That detail alone had readers practically screaming, because for many, that’s the whole problem in one painfully relatable moment.
The strongest reaction was split between "same here" and "that’s a you problem." One camp said the post hit hard: AI can make people feel rusty, passive, and weirdly dependent, like your brain is being outsourced one prompt at a time. Another camp was much less sympathetic. One blunt reply basically said, you did this to yourself, while a snarkier joker tossed out, "Use AI to fix that cert," turning the whole existential spiral into a meme.
Then came the spicy status battle: is writing less code actually bad if you’re getting paid more and making bigger decisions? One commenter argued the real skill isn’t typing every line anymore — it’s thinking clearly and catching important problems before they explode. Another shrugged that this is just history repeating itself: people once obsessed over hand-crafting everything, and now most of us happily live at a higher level. Translation: some readers see brain rot, others see promotion.
Key Points
- •The author says frequent use of AI for writing has made them feel less capable of writing on their own.
- •The article links AI reliance to self-doubt and imposter syndrome, describing a feedback loop between uncertainty and dependence on AI output.
- •The author states they have used AI almost exclusively for coding for one to two years and have not written code themselves during that time.
- •The author says this reliance has led them to forget much of how to code and has prompted them to start relearning coding manually.
- •The article argues that AI will reduce but not eliminate the need for people who can read and write code, and references Robert Martin's comments on professionalism in programming.