A Dignified Start
Our symptoms all started quite respectably. At first, it was just laziness—not wanting to look up documentation, not wanting to search. What is gRPC? Ask AI. How to cache dependencies in GitHub Actions? Ask AI. How to optimize this SQL query? Ask AI. It felt normal. After all, tools are there for us to slack off with sometimes.
But gradually, laziness became a necessity. You start to realize that without AI, you can't even write a for loop properly. You remember the syntax, but the "implementation path" in your brain has completely vanished. The demand in your mind shifted from "how to design" to "how to prompt."
And then, later, things got even worse. During code reviews, you start to feel uneasy: "This was written by AI, don't blame me." You begin patching up what AI wrote, like a janitor cleaning up the mess it left behind. Ironically, you do it willingly, because the code you write yourself is even worse.
The Feeling of Being Served
We actually kind of enjoy being useless, don't we? We curse the AI-generated code as crap, but deep down, we love it. The thrill of "I propose a requirement, and someone implements it for me" is as addictive as smoking weed. You're no longer a pure coder; you're an architect, a product manager, a technical director. You're the big boss. AI is just your poor employee, and if it writes poorly, you can even replace it. Who would refuse this illusionary experience?
AI never talks back. It never says, "This design is utterly stupid." It never rolls its eyes at your requirements or throws passive-aggressive remarks. It just says, "Okay, here's your code." A perfect slave, fattening your laziness and your ego.
You start to fear "uncertainty." The feeling of facing a blank IDE, fingers hovering over the keyboard, a thousand thoughts racing through your mind—it terrifies you. You just want an answer, like having an open book in front of you during an exam you don't know how to answer. See the result quickly, finish the task quickly. You no longer want to "think"; you just want to "deliver" fast.
A Conspiracy
This is a conspiracy—a collaboration between tools, capital, and platforms. It's not entirely your fault. Various IDE vendors have made AI features default-on, reducing latency to lower and lower levels (even below 50ms). They practically want to remap the "Tab" key to an "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 in the background. They've discovered that a junior programmer with AI can perform like a senior engineer. Labor costs are slashed, product output doubles. Financial reports look better, stock prices soar. As for your technical growth? They couldn't care less.
The open-source community is also becoming cancerous. Copilot uses open source as fertilizer and then sells it back to you. Stack Overflow traffic has plummeted because the number of questions is steadily 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 job hunting now, interviews test prompt engineering instead of algorithm design and design principles. Knowledge sharing has transformed from pure technical discussions into "AI tool recommendation conferences." Code reviews in open-source communities have become about cleaning up after AI.
Standards are also shifting. The definition of "spaghetti code" has been rewritten. In the past, spaghetti code was due to business complexity or heavy legacy baggage. Now, spaghetti code is layered on by AI, and you have no idea what the underlying logic is. Fix one bug, and AI generates a three-line patch that introduces five new bugs. You use AI to fix those, and the cycle continues, turning the entire system into a chaos that even AI can't understand.
Those "open-source enthusiasts"—their first PR was generated by AI, their first Issue was filed by AI, and even their README introduction was written by AI. They've never experienced the thrill of having a "barely written" feature merged, never felt the enlightenment when community veterans manually point out design flaws in your code. The years 2024 and 2025 have spawned a bunch of "AI-native open-source contributors," the first generation of "open-source parasites"—those who don't create knowledge but merely shuttle AI-generated code blocks.
It's Already Too Late
The tragedy is that by the time you realize it, it's already too late. You want to make a change. You don't want to be controlled by AI's output capabilities anymore. But you can't help it—you still open those AI tools: "Help me summarize the meaning of this code," "Help me write a caching mechanism."
See, that's the root of the disease.
We're not discussing the worn-out choice of "whether to use AI or not." This is a reading comprehension test that's already been turned in. Your brain has been reverse-trained by AI; your neural connections have been reshaped by AI's output. It's like in The Matrix—you know you're in the simulation, but you can no longer find the red pill to swallow.
The despair is that even if you start "detoxing" now—uninstalling plugins, coding offline, writing logic by hand—you can never go back. Every line of code you write, a voice in your head will whisper: "Wouldn't it be faster to ask AI?" That voice won't disappear; it will follow you to the grave. You have to keep using AI to survive in this industry or circle. Because everyone is using it, all tools are integrating it by default, and all projects are scheduled based on "AI-assisted efficiency." Your individual clarity 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
Even after writing this, I'll still go back to using Copilot. At least I can switch to a free model—a dumb free model with all its capabilities weakened. At least for now, I can pretend to go back to the old days. I'm still resisting, still using dumb AI, still writing by hand, like a stubborn caveman. Looking at those around me who claim to know front-end but actually rely entirely on AI, I feel proud yet a little sad. Who knows? Maybe one day I'll obediently switch back to Claude's latest model and return to a life sponsored by AI agents. That's the big trend. No one 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 walking toward decay with full awareness is probably the fate of this generation of programmers. We've witnessed the miracle of tools, and we've also witnessed the slow death of our own brains.
We are all dead. The "real self"—that diff—will never have a chance to be merged into the main line of life. We're just walking corpses that haven't been "committed to the database" yet.