A developer's confession after one month without AI: dumber, lazier, and losing control

One Month Without AI

After a month without AI coding tools, the author looks back: it started with asking AI to write a function, then escalated to feeding entire Jira tickets to multiple agents in parallel. He realized he hadn't written a single line of code or even a commit message himself in months. Every AI-generated PR took two days to review, fix style, and add tests—far longer than doing it manually. Code quality kept dropping, requiring repeated prompting. He calls the perceived speedup an illusion that left him exhausted and disconnected from his own code.

Why it matters: A first-person experiment with concrete numbers, not vague complaining. The 'two days per PR to review' cost is a rare quantified pushback against AI coding hype. Not scored higher because it's a personal blog, not an industry event, and the body was truncated, leaving the ful...