AI Is Making Me a Lazy Coder (And Honestly, I’ve Earned It)
I have been writing code long enough to remember Beltel and dial-up modems (showing my age). The screeching handshake of the 2400 baud modem, the dropped connections, and the reality that if the internet went down, you carried on with whatever documentation you already had. There was no “quick lookup”. You either knew it or you figured it out. HTML as we knew it was extremely basic with just a few markup tags.
That era shaped a lot of us. It forced fundamentals. It also wasted an incredible amount of time. I remember watching movies like Tron and Hackers, it motivated me to be a better programmer and keep going.
Back then, being a good developer meant memorising syntax, writing boilerplate by hand, and debugging by trial and error. You didn’t search your way out of problems, you thought your way out of them. When Turbo Basic came out, I first read the whole user manual, sussed out what commands were supported and what they did. That way, while I was coding, I would “know” if there was a command to do what I wanted.
If I needed my code to be faster, I would write a DLL using Turbo C, all we had were the manuals.
Fast forward to today and my workflow looks very different. I don’t use Stack Overflow anymore. I live in GitHub, source code, and tools like ChatGPT and Copilot. If I need a scaffold, a refactor, or a reminder of syntax I haven’t touched in a while, I ask.
You know how it is, you research how to do something, build it, and then forget about it, till you have to do it again, fuzzy memories of long nights, trying out an algorithm or bending the code to your will. Now I watch movies like Anti-Trust and The Social Network to keep me energised and in the game that is coding.
That’s where the “lazy coder” feeling creeps in.
I write less code by hand. I memorise less. I don’t grind through repetitive problems that are already solved. Instead, I delegate the boring parts to uncle AI.
The uncomfortable question is whether that makes me worse, or just more efficient.
I ship faster. I explore more ideas. I spend more time on architecture and less on ceremony. I focus more on why we’re building something rather than how many lines of code it takes to get there. I’m not struggling less because I’m weaker. I’m struggling less because the tools got better.
AI didn’t remove skill, it shifted it. The real value now is asking good questions, knowing when the answer is wrong, understanding trade-offs, reviewing code critically, and designing systems that survive production. AI can generate code, but it can’t understand your constraints, your environment, or your users.
Many a time I have asked questions, only to end up going in circles. The trick is to know when to call it, and just do it yourself, or reset and try a different approach.
There is a danger here. Blind copy-paste, skipping understanding, and letting tools make design decisions will absolutely rot your skills. AI is an amplifier. It makes good developers faster and bad habits scale quickly.
I don’t want to be lazy about thinking. I do want to be lazy about repetition. I don’t miss writing DTOs by hand or scaffolding the same patterns for the hundredth time. I’d rather spend that energy on system boundaries, failure modes, security, and building things that don’t wake me up at two in the morning.
Lately, I have been dreaming in code, all night long, not so much about unsolved problems anymore, but about features and the cool things I may be able to do tomorrow.
AI isn’t making me a lazy coder. It’s making me selectively lazy, and after surviving dial-up internet, missing documentation, and far too many late nights chasing syntax errors, I think I’ve earned that upgrade.
Use AI to augment your reality and embrace what it helps you become.
I used AI to word that sentence just right.
