The fear of not growing due to AI

So basically, I feel trapped in this AI world, and from what I can see on Reddit I’m not the only one, which makes me feel better tbh.

I started learning to code by myself pretty recently, around 2022, and if I’m not wrong, I tried ChatGPT for the first time as a coding helper in mid-2023. At that moment I had very basic knowledge, but enough to barely understand what the AI was throwing at me. Still, that felt like the first line of coke for an addict I was fascinated by how fast I was now able to solve problems.

Newbie bugs that took me days to solve were now done by AI in a matter of minutes. However, the barrier was still there: there was no MCP, you needed to copy-paste from VS Code to the chat, so many times you still had to put in some effort to fix things.

Now, with Cursor, Copilot, and so on, everything has changed drastically. These days, I sometimes spend the whole day writing either in English or Spanish but not really coding. I do read code, but it’s weird when I write more than four or five lines of code myself in a day.

So I need to ask: how good or bad is this behavior?

It doesn’t seem very good because you get lazy, but on the other hand you focus more on architecture, code cleaning tasks, reviewing, etc. And was this really what I wanted when I started? I wanted to look like a hacker, not like a bored police officer staring at a security monitor.

It’s easy to say: “Then stop using AI tools and start doing some real coding yourself.” Yeah, sure but what if you work at a startup and everything is for yesterday? And not only that, but the whole market has now adapted to the speed AI tools gave us. Nobody expects a new feature to take 2–4 weeks anymore, but 1–2 days.

Everything is going so fast that you simply can’t stop and say, “Okay, I will change my habits so even if I’m slower, my coding skills will grow.” Well, maybe just maybe you can do that in your free time, but even then you feel stupid going that slow when you know that with a simple prompt everything is done.

What do you think? What can we, the new developers, do to keep growing our knowledge without losing that AI speed?