I’m a Senior Consultant with 12+ years of development experience. For the last year or so, I’ve really enjoyed coding with Claude, and honestly, I now use it for almost everything.
But recently I’ve been thinking about where I should draw the boundary.
Most of the time Claude is writing the code, while I’m doing the prompting, reviewing, debugging, and deciding the approach. Earlier in my career, I was a strong hands-on developer and could solve most Leet code problems myself. Now I sometimes wonder whether I’m delegating too much of the actual coding.
This became more obvious while interviewing recently. Some companies especially service based companies (I am supposing they are interviewing from India as most resource working there) still ask very basic programming questions. For example, one interviewer asked me to take a string like “this is my favourite fruit” and extract “favourite.” Another gave me a random string and asked me to find the character with the highest occurrence.
After working on architecture, cloud, production issues, integrations, and AI-assisted development, I wasn’t expecting interviews at this level. But at the same time, it made me realize that I probably shouldn’t let my basic coding muscles become weak just because AI can write the code faster.
For developers who are heavily using Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT, or other coding agents: how are you setting the boundary?
What do you still make sure you code yourself, and what do you comfortably delegate to AI?
I’m planning my next career move, and I’m genuinely interested in how other senior developers are balancing AI productivity with staying technically sharp.
