It's 11 pm. You have been staring at the same bug for three hours. You are tired. You give the whole thing to Codex or Claude and say, "Just fix this".
It gives you a solution. Tests pass. You commit and go to bed.

Did you understand what just fixed your bug?

I have done this, and I am sure most of us have. For me, the problem is not using AI to get unstuck. The problem is that when you do it so often, you stop being able to get yourself unstuck. I am afraid of a situation where one day, you are in an interview, or an outage, or a code review, and there is no AI.

I would also like to assume that for most people, AI handles the boring parts, and you get to focus on the hard thinking, meaning you ship better work in less time. That is real, and it is great.

But there is another version where you are just getting faster at not learning anything.

What do you think? Is Your AI Assistant Making You a Better Developer, or Just a Faster One?