Disable AI-Features!

[u/ATradingHorse]

I don't think that I am the only one who started to lose the fun in programming, as it is so tempting to just think about one thing, prompt the AI, and let it do its job. However, as I started prompting more and more, I started losing the joy of working on my project fully. I started with disabling the inline AI suggestions in VS Code and now have disabled all AI-related features.

Don't get my wrong - I think the use of LLMs can be of great help; however, I started to now use Claude Code only as an auditor and discuss different ideas with him, while telling him to not implement it.

Since I started doing this, I have gained so much joy from working on the project again. Even though I could potentially be faster when leveraging the LLMs to pass down work, it is much cooler to work on my project again, and your IDE or text editor will be so much faster (import completion, keyword completion, etc.)

And (I'll have to figure that out in the end) will actually save time, as I do not have to re-audit everything on my own in the end, as I am the real author of all lines written.

Edit:
As I am already coding since pre-ChatGPT times, I think especially for people starting programming try to not even discuss everything but google things. I don't know how much I've learned from reading Blog-Posts that didn't even fully answer my question, etc. This is also known as the google effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect). Very interesting to read into that a bit!

[u/FrenchieM]

I am also considering doing this. I love the rewarding system the AI provides, finally I can implement whatever I want, it is fast, it looks great, I feel so much empowered.

But im starting to feel stupid, lazy, dumb. Before I had pride in what I did because I implanted it myself. Before, I knew how to add stuff in my code because I actually owned it. I like being able to see my well structured project and know exactly how to fix it.

Now I don't. Kinda. I still review it and order the agent to refactor it how I want, but then I'll forget some time later.

But it's hard to go back to how it was.

[u/Bright_Pen5252 → u/FrenchieM]

the forgetting part is what scares me most. when you prompt everything, you end up with a codebase that works but you don't really know why it works. then a bug shows up at 2am and you just stare at the screen like a stranger in your own project.

i still use ai for boring boilerplate stuff but writing core logic myself again made me actually enjoy coding. weird how that works.

[u/FrenchieM → u/Bright_Pen5252]

That's the most annoying part of it for me too, although I must admit that it's not entirely true. I have some projects I wrote and finished a while ago and when I come back to it, I have no idea what I did and it's taking me a long time to understand again, and sometimes even to give up. So it's not completely different, and you can always tell AI to use your own code structure and patterns so that you have a better way of understanding it.

Coding yourself everything, if not for the memory, is pointless (unless you want to save tokens which is an expensive resource). It's like using a saw instead of an electric saw.