How AI Ruined My Life

 The irony is, I’m using AI to help me write this post.

I still remember the first time I came across ChatGPT. It was during my first year of college, in a Computer Science Overview class. Back then, it was this fresh, fascinating thing that no one in my class had really heard about. I told my instructor about it.

And I said it will be replacing us programmers,and she simply said, “It seems so.😅”

Fast forward to 2025, I’m now in my senior year with just three credits left to graduate, and guess what? AI has been by my side throughout my entire college journey.

In many ways, it became a habit. I tried to stay different though; instead of blindly copying whatever the AI suggested, I made an effort to review the code, tweak it, and understand what it was doing. But if I’m being honest, a huge chunk of my functions, methods, and boilerplate code came straight from AI tools.

And here’s where things got messy.

I started noticing a pattern. When an error popped up, I didn’t bother reading it; I’d just copy the error message, paste it into the AI chat, get a response, and copy-paste the solution back into my code. Guess what? More errors appeared. It became a vicious cycle of copy, paste, break, repeat. Somewhere along the way, I stopped truly learning.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is incredible. I even use it as a kind of therapist sometimes. But let’s be real, most of the time it’s more like a fancy search engine than an actual software engineer.

That’s why I recently made a decision:
I’m cutting back on AI.

I don’t want to be the programmer who can’t troubleshoot, who panics at error messages, or who needs a chatbot to write every single line of code. I want to get back to what made coding fun in the first place, the challenge, the late-night debugging sessions, the satisfaction of solving a problem on my own.

So here’s to doing it like the OGs did, maybe with a little help now and then. 😉