A Decent Beginning

Our symptoms started decently. At first, it was just being too lazy to look up documentation or search. What is gRPC? Ask AI. How to cache dependencies in GitHub Actions? Ask AI. How to optimize this SQL query? Ask AI. That's normal—after all, everyone gets lazy with tools sometimes.

But gradually, laziness became a necessity. You start to realize that without AI, you can't even write a simple for loop smoothly. You remember the syntax, but the memory of the 'implementation path' in your brain is completely gone. The demands in your mind shifted from 'how to design' to 'how to prompt.'

Then, later and later, things got worse. During Code Review, you start to feel guilty: 'This was written by AI, don't blame me.' You start patching what AI wrote, like a janitor cleaning up the mess behind AI. Ironically, you're willing to do it because the code you write yourself is even worse.

The Feeling of Being Served

We actually enjoy being useless, don't we? We curse AI-generated code as shit on the surface, but deep down it feels great. The pleasure of 'I propose a requirement, and someone helps me implement it' is addictive like marijuana. You are no longer a mere coder; you are an architect, a product manager, a technical director. You are the big boss, and AI is just your poor employee—if it writes poorly, you can even replace it. Who would refuse such an illusory experience?

AI never contradicts you. It won't say 'this design is utterly stupid,' won't roll its eyes at your requirements, won't be sarcastic with you. It will only say: 'Okay, here's your code.' A perfect slave, feeding your laziness and also inflating your ego.

You start to fear 'uncertainty'—the feeling of facing a blank IDE, fingers hovering over the keyboard, with a thousand thoughts racing in your mind. You just want an answer, like encountering a problem you don't know in an exam but with an open book in front of you—quickly see the result, quickly finish the task. You no longer want to endure 'thinking'; you only want fast 'delivery.'

A Conspiracy

This is a conspiracy—a conspiracy of tools, capital, and platforms. It's not your fault alone. Various IDE vendors make AI enabled by default, reducing latency to lower and lower (even below 50ms). They would love to change the 'Tab key' to 'AI key.' Why? Because user retention and paid conversion rates skyrocket. You're not dependent on AI; you're dependent on their products.

Capital is cheering behind the scenes, discovering that a junior programmer with AI can be used like a senior engineer. Labor costs are slashed, product output doubles. Financial reports look better, stock prices take off. As for your technical growth? Who cares?

The open source community is also becoming cancerous. Copilot uses open source as fertilizer, then sells it to you. Stack Overflow traffic plummets because the number of questions is gradually decreasing. The flow of knowledge has shifted from 'people helping people' to 'machines training people.' Now the entire ecosystem encourages you: don't think, just use AI.

The Industry Is Rotting

The entire industry is being corrupted by AI. Look around you. When looking for a job, interviews start testing prompt engineering instead of algorithm design and design principles. Knowledge has shifted from pure technical sharing to 'AI tool recommendation conferences.' Code review in open source communities has become cleaning up after AI.

Standards are shifting. The definition of 'shit mountain' code has been rewritten. In the past, shit mountain was due to business complexity or too much legacy baggage. Now, shit mountain is piled up layer by layer by AI—you have no idea what the underlying logic is. Fix one bug, AI generates a three-line patch but introduces five new bugs. You continue to use AI to fix them, cycling repeatedly, and the entire system becomes a mess that even AI can't understand.

Those 'open source enthusiasts'—their first PR was generated by AI, their first Issue was submitted by AI, even their self-introduction README was written by AI. They have never experienced the thrill of having a 'bare-written' function merged, never witnessed the eye-opening moment when community experts manually point out design flaws in your code. The years 2024 and 2025 have spawned a bunch of 'AI-native open source contributors,' also the first generation of 'parasites of the open source community'—those who don't create knowledge but merely copy AI-generated code blocks.

It's Already Too Late

The tragedy is that you realize it's too late. You want to change, you don't want to be controlled by AI's output capabilities. But you can't help it—you still open those AIs: 'Help me summarize the meaning of this code,' 'Help me write a caching mechanism.'

See, that's the root cause.

We have never discussed the cliché question of 'whether to use AI or not.' This is a reading comprehension question that has already been submitted. Your brain has been reverse-trained by AI; the neural connections have been reshaped by AI's output. Like in 'The Matrix,' you know you are in the Matrix, but you can no longer find the red pill to swallow.

Despairingly, even if you start 'detoxing' now—uninstalling plugins, coding offline, writing logic manually—you cannot go back. Every time you write a line of code, a voice in your head says: 'Wouldn't it be faster to ask AI?' This voice won't disappear; it will follow you to the grave. You have to continue using AI to survive in this industry or circle. Because everyone is using it, all tools are integrated by default, and all projects are scheduled with 'AI-assisted efficiency' in mind. Your personal sobriety cannot fight the madness of the entire system. You can choose to be a 'conscious AI slave' or an 'unconscious AI puppet.' There is no third option.

Final Chapter

After finishing this article, I will still go back to using Copilot. At least I can switch the large model to a free one—each of these free models is an idiot with weakened abilities—at least for now, I can still pretend to go back to the old days. I am still resisting, still using dumb AI and hand-writing code, like a stubborn caveman. Looking at the people around me who claim to know frontend but actually everything is written by AI, I feel proud yet a bit sad. Who knows? Maybe one day I will obediently switch back to Claude's latest model and return to the life of being supported by AI agents. That's the trend—nobody waits for you to adapt; society's pace is getting faster and faster, and those who slow down will be optimized away like bugs.

This feeling of moving toward decay with clear awareness is probably the fate of this generation of programmers. We have witnessed the miracle of tools, and also witnessed the slow death of our own brains.

We are all dead—the 'real self' diff never has a chance to be merged into the mainline of life. We are just walking corpses not yet committed to the database.