Been a PT by day, tinkering with code and AI tools by night for a while now. Writing dev tutorials as a side thing. And I keep running into this split where AI tools either make me faster or make me lazier in a way I regret later.
Specifically with documentation and code explanation tools. Cursor, Copilot, the Claude API, whatever. They can explain a codebase to you in 30 seconds. But there's a real cost when you skip the part where you actually understand what you built.
The flip side is time is finite. I'm not a full time dev. I need to ship something that works and move on. Using AI to fill gaps is just practical.
What I keep coming back to is this: are these tools actually accelerating skill development, or just making it possible to fake competence long enough to finish a project? For professional devs this probably matters differently than it does for people building side projects with limited hours.
Curious where people land on this. Not in a philosophical way, more practically. Has your actual skill level gone up since you started leaning on these tools, or are you more dependent now than you were a year ago?
The tutorial-writing angle makes this sharper — you can’t publish a “how this works” piece from a 30-second codebase summary. I’d use the AI explain step to orient fast, then trace one real path yourself before you ship or publish; that’s usually where the skill sticks instead of the dependency.