Programming Without AI, Again

For two years, my first move on any problem was opening an agent, before I had even thought about the problem myself. I’m programming without AI again now.

AI doesn’t write bad code, most of the time. That was never the issue. The issue is that I had stopped writing code myself, and I want that back.

What dependency looked like

It crept in slowly. First AI was a better search engine. Then autocomplete on steroids. Then one day I caught myself describing what I wanted and reviewing the output, like a manager of my own codebase. I wasn’t reading documentation anymore. I wasn’t holding whole systems in my head. The parts of programming I actually loved, the thinking, were exactly the parts I had outsourced.

AI didn’t make me a worse programmer by itself. I just stopped training the skills it was replacing.

What I’m doing now

I write the code. When I get stuck, I do it the old way: read the docs, read the source, write a small test, think. It’s slower, noticeably slower at the start, because those muscles had atrophied.

Something else came back though. I understand every line I ship. When a bug appears at midnight, I know where to look, because I made every decision in that system. The codebase is mine in a way it hadn’t been for two years.

The tool I actually want

This isn’t a manifesto against machine help. I still think there’s a version of this that works, and nobody has built it properly yet. I call it supervised coding, and the rules are simple:

• The code is mine. The tool never edits files on its own.
• I write. The tool answers questions, explains, points at things. It’s a colleague sitting next to me, not an intern taking over my keyboard.
• If I can’t explain a change, it doesn’t get merged.

Think autopilot versus co-pilot. The autopilot flies for you; the co-pilot helps you fly. We got sold the autopilot. I’d take the co-pilot.

Slower on purpose

With AI I could scaffold a feature in an afternoon. On my own it takes longer. That’s the deal.

But most of what I shipped fast, I also abandoned fast. The projects that taught me something, the ones I kept, were the ones I struggled with.

So that’s where I am: programming without AI again. Maybe not forever. The ideal is the supervised version, where the machine helps me think instead of thinking for me. Until someone builds that, I’ll be the one reading the docs.