I have stopped using it, because the skill atrophy kicked in and I don’t want to turn into someone chatting with a bot every day.

To quote myself:

I work as a software developer and over the last months, I slipped into a habit of letting ChatGPT write more and more code for me. It’s just so easy to do! Write a function here, do some documentation there, do all of the boilerplate for me, set up some pre-commit hooks, …

Two weeks ago I deleted my OpenAI account and forced myself to write all code without LLMs, just as I did before. Because there is one very real problem of excessive AI useage in software development: Skill atrophy.

I was actively losing knowledge. Sometimes I had to look up the easiest things (like builtin Javascript functions) I was definitely able to work with off the top of my head just a year ago. I turned away from being an actual developer to someone chatting with a machine. I slowly lost the fun in coding, because I outsourced the problem solving aspects that gave me a dopamine boost to the AI. I basically became a glorified copypaster.

I really hope so, but for that to happen, hardware prices have to go down again and that might take a while.

The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude

While it took me a few months to really notice it, that still shocked me. Using AI extensively makes you depend on it - and that’s exactly what the big players want. A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.

Since I am not forced to use it, I deleted my OpenAI account and started to code without LLM assistance again. It’s much more fun to solve problems by myself (and get a dopamine kick out of that) anyway - and when the bubble inevitably pops, I can still go on as I did before.

Unless, perhaps, AI five years from now understands that too.

LLMs have already hit a ceiling, the improvements between new model releases are pretty much negligible. They had to come up with very expensive agents checking the output to reduce hallucinations. The best example for that is GPT-5 from OpenAI, which was extremely underwhelming.

I have a job and no one forces me to use AI. Feels like an absolute dream right now.

I bought a netbook (GPD Win Max 2) with 64GB of RAM last year. It was really expensive, by 2025 standards.

But now I feel like I have the power of the universe in my jacket pocket. Best irresponsible buying decision I ever made.