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I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.” [brettcodes.com]

I am very sympathetic to the feelings he's expressing. As a lifetime programmer, I know exactly what he's feeling. But for me, coding has always been a means to an end. I want to build a game or make an app or have a blog. As a coder, I could implement these things better/faster than others…

If your "end" is just for you, cool. But if it is for other people to use/enjoy you need to know that we can tell when something was created with passion and when something was created simply to exist and we overwhelming want the former.

What makes you think the specific tool I choose to use reflects how much passion and effort and love goes into something? Is my writing less my expression if I use a word processor instead of a typewriter? Your statement includes a great deal of assumption and borders on a puritanical view of life.

The discourse is strained by making it a black-and-white purity test. I’ve written games from assembly language putting bytes in memory to rasterizing textured triangles to OpenGL to Unity to Unreal. Which one of those crossed the imaginary line of “passion” vs “simply to exist”?

Here's the thing. We can't know you or any other dev, so we have to judge you based on what we know, and what we know is genAI is used *overwhelmingly* by slop-peddling turds just trying to scam a buck, so if you're using it, you get lumped in with them out of necessity.

No, I get lumped in with them out of critical laziness. I could trivially knock out slop right now using Unity and stock art. It’s still slop, whether or not I tick the “uses ai” box. Not because of the tools used (or not used), but because of the care taken and the results produced.

Steam alone added ~9,000 games in the first 5 months of 2026 alone. I can't critically investigate each and every one so I must use my superior mammalian ability to recognize patterns to narrow the number down significantly. AI use is not just an easy way to do that, but a necessary one.