📰 Story

The Emotional Cost of AI-Assisted Coding

This post doesn’t have a blog or article; it is a blog itself (kind of). I’m just sharing how coding agents feel. A little about me: I started CS in 2020. I liked being able to instruct and interact with the world through code. I especially liked how code runs on hardware, and how software plus hardware can make machines learn patterns. Coding in the pre-LLM era felt like real engineering. I don’t have the words for it, but things felt grounded, discrete math, fundamentals, networking protocols, it felt like hard engineering. A simple web server on a Sunday morning felt like an intellectual endeavour. After reading docs, architecture patterns, and obscure engineer blogs, you actually learned something that stayed with you, plus a small proud GitHub project (think Sophomore CS grad perspective). Life was simpler. Fast forward 6 years. People are obsessed with AI. Obsessed with results, not process or learning. Not a day goes by without “cracked builders”, “token maxing”, “AI first”. Non-technical people ship features, then break core infra. I feel coding agents (and AI tools that remove difficulty from tasks where difficulty was the learning) are, for many, less about value and more about dopamine hits, quick stimulation, and attention reward loops. Like short-form content, engagement over substance. I’m not an AI doomer, but I think we need to better train people to use it properly. AI has shifted reward from learning fundamentals to just optimizing output, does it work or no