Even for employees who’ve managed to hold onto their jobs, AI is having a very real impact at work.

As corporations boast about how much they’re investing in automation, the reality is that many employers are practically forcing the tech on their workers. Nowhere has that been more visible than software engineers, with companies including Meta even introducing “leaderboards” to show which employees are burning the most AI tokens in real-time.

But it turns out that embrace of AI by programmers may come at a steep price. Many are speaking out, saying they now simply review AI-generated code instead of writing it themselves — a rote task, it turns out, that’s an important part of keeping their technical skills sharp.

Similar complaints are proliferating across social media, and 404 Media talked to more developers who confirmed the problem.

“I had some issues where I forgot how to implement a Laravel API and it scared the s**t out of me,” one engineer, who requested to remain anonymous, told 404. “I went to university for this, I’ve been a software engineer for many years now and it feels like I am back before I ever wrote a single line of code.”

Not all companies mandate the use of AI in the workplace, but the tools are seductive regardless. Another anonymous software engineer told 404 that while he wasn’t outright forced to use LLMs, he and his colleagues were discreetly given access to Cursor for coding and found themselves using it regularly. Sure, he found, AI coding tools can save time and effort — but if they undermine core intellectual skills required to architect larger projects, the problem is soon going to come home to roost for employers.

“It’s making me dumber for sure,” the same developer told 404. “It’s like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it’s grown to me mentally outsourcing ‘thinking’ in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take.”

A growing body of research supports the idea that our critical thinking skills are being sanded down by AI use. With everyone from veteran software coders to students morphing into mindless zombies, the apocalypse may come at the hands of AI, after all.

More on the impacts of AI: AI Is Destroying a Generation of Students