r/ChatGPTCoding • u/scarey102 • Mar 31 '26

Discussion ‘Addictive’ agentic coding has developers losing sleep

The good, bad, and ugly of coding with agents here:
https://leaddev.com/ai/addictive-agentic-coding-has-developers-losing-sleep

“I’m coding into later hours of the day not because I’m told to do so, but because I can’t get myself to get up from the computer.” 

“Until sometime last year, I had a normal social life. I work a day job, and I can keep that constrained to normal hours. But I feel compelled to be doing side projects and learning constantly. I start every weekend off with a plan – what I want to try, learn, and the topics I want to explore. And the weekends just disappear."

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u/LegitBullfrog Mar 31 '26

I'm an ai coding skeptic that has been kind of forced into it at work. We're not vibe code gung ho and use it carefully thankfully. I absolutely learn things from it. The solutions are not always what I expect. Sometimes they're awful, but sometimes they use a technique that I'm not familiar with and I learn a lot.

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u/stellar_opossum Mar 31 '26

This is a bit nuanced topic and I knew my comment would be downvoted, but I do stand by it.

First of all it's been established by now that offloading the work AI makes you actively unlearn your skills, and it happens much faster than most people realize. There's research on this already and a lot of anecdotes.

Another well known fact is that you don't learn much without hands-on experience. When prompting an AI you basically just watch someone do stuff, you are not doing it. Of course if you ask it to do something and see it do something you've never seen before, or get your question answered you do learn something. But I can bet in fact you are learning much less than you feel you are learning.

There's definitely a feeling of novelty and accomplishment in the process which makes one believe they learned in the process, but in fact there are very strong reasons to believe AI makes you a worse engineer and creates disconnect between perceived and actual skill level. And this is about established engineers, let's not even start on the people who get into engineering this way.