Losing the Hands-On Feeling

Part two of a three-part series on AI and craft — after AI Dependence and the Deskilling of Developers.

I think this week marks an inflection point for me vis-à-vis the use of AI for programming. Ever since Claude Haiku came out (I'm currently using Claude Opus), it is capable of handling reasonably complicated tasks reasonably well, all the way from task ticket/issue to raising the PR. It can handle more than one requirement at once, and with judicious use of copilot instruction files can reasonably understand not only the codebase but how to interact with it and its linked tools. Enabling Linear's integration with GitHub Copilot has allowed me to delegate tasks entirely (mostly) to AI.

The drawback is that now, while the code generation has gotten more impressive and less buggy, whenever I have to manipulate it or port it somewhere, I feel like I never touched it before directly, so I have lost that hands-on feeling. There's also a feeling you get in your brain when you look at code you have written yourself vs someone else has. Your body remembers writing the code, and you are more confident and knowledgeable about each component.

Now, sure, if you go back and look at code you wrote even a couple weeks and months ago, at some point it also feels foreign and you don't even remember writing it. Sometimes I'm impressed by code I've written in the past, while other times I feel a unique kind of cringe.

I feel that using the AI to write code that it is better at than I am will mean I no longer give myself the chance to get better in those domains or libraries. I thought if I let the AI do the grunt work that I don't want to do, I could take over the parts that interest me and invest in learning that instead. However, there is a temptation to just architect and plan out solutions even in domains that I specialize in, and hand over the actual implementation to the AI.

I am currently in a situation where I feel that rather than trying to migrate AI-written code, I should take the chance to re-write AI-written code from scratch so that I understand it more innately.