Stop relying on AI for coding: keep your skills while you use it
Do not ban the tools. Change what you ask them. Make your own guess at the cause or the design first, ask the AI for the idea before the code, and never accept a change you cannot explain in one line. That is the pattern that kept people learning in the one trial that looked.
What the trials found
- Handing over the task cost skill. In a trial with 52 developers (Shen and Tamkin, Anthropic, 2026, a preprint), the AI group scored about 50% on a skills quiz against 67% for the group without AI. The developers who asked the AI conceptual questions kept learning. The ones who delegated did not.
- Feeling fast is not being fast. In a 2025 trial, 16 experienced open-source developers were 19% slower with early-2025 AI tools, and believed they had been 20% faster. The same group's 2026 follow-up suggests a possible speedup with newer tools, and calls its own data unreliable. Either way, your sense of speed is a poor guide.
The routine
Guess before you ask
Write one line: what do I think is wrong, or how would I build this? Thirty seconds. It turns the AI's answer into feedback on your thinking.
Ask for the idea, then the code
"Explain the approach and what could go wrong. No code yet." Read it. Try to write it yourself. Ask for code only for the part you are stuck on.
Predict before you run
Before running anything the AI wrote, say what it will do. When you are wrong, you have found the thing worth learning.
One line per accepted change
For every change you keep, write one line on why it works: in the commit message, a comment or your notes. If you cannot, you do not own that code yet.
Pick "Coding" in the coach setup. It tells the AI to ask what you have tried before it gives code.
Small rules developers already use
- Docs first for anything you will use again. The AI is fine for the one-off regex. Read the docs for the library you will live in.
- Retype, do not paste, when the code is something you want to learn.
- One AI-free block a week. A small task, start to finish, no assistant. It tells you where your skills really are.
- Use the learning modes. Several coding assistants now have a mode that explains and asks instead of writing. Turn it on for unfamiliar ground.
Questions
Is it bad to use AI for boilerplate?
No. Handing off code you already know how to write costs you little. The risk is in handing off the parts you have not learned yet.
I am a junior. Should I avoid AI completely?
You do not have to. Use it as the senior who asks "what have you tried?" rather than the one who takes the keyboard. Conceptual questions are where people in the trial kept learning.
How do I know if my skills are slipping?
Try a small task with no assistant once a week. If it feels much harder than it did a few months ago, shift more of your asks from "write this" to "explain this".