Use it or lose it
How do you prevent any kind of atrophy?
Muscles you don’t use get weaker. Languages you don’t speak often fade. So why do you think skills are any different?
Skills you don’t practice atrophy. So the fix is quite obvious if not boring. You just need to keep using the skill. Or at the very least, maintain it.
The skill that I’m talking about here and that I’ve started to neglect (as many of us do) is writing code and critical thinking, in some extent.
What does using AI daily actually cost us?
I use AI every day for coding. And for many other tasks as well. By AI I mean LLM and tools like Claude Code, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and similar. They are fast and genuinely useful. But they come with a cost that rearly appears in the sprint report.
- Cognitive debt. Even though I review every line that AI writes, but reviewing the code is not the same as writing it myself. My mental model of the system gets a little thinner with every line and change I didn’t build or write myself.
- Less engagement. When an AI agent writes the code, I don’t feel as attached to it or to its result. Seems like somone else’s work that I just happend to approve.
- Weaker critical thinking. When reviewing AI generated code and their answers (which are very plausible), I don’t feel like I’m using the same “muscles” as producing them myself.
- Shallow skill building. I’m not gonna say I’ve stopped learning. I do. And AI is a great tool for learning. But I feel like the knowledge I gain is shallow. The same as if you just watch YouTube videos of someone programming or reading a blog article without doing it yourself. I’m learning new APIs, patterns, tools and new programming languages every week. But I don’t do a deep dives into any of them.
These scares me. Especially the last two.
What is “No AI Fridays”?
“No AI Fridays” is a practice I’ve adopted from noaifridays.com which got discussed on Hacker News too. Idea behind it is that for one day a week you don’t use AI. No chat, no agents, no autocomplete. Just my (or you), the editor, the docs, Google or StackOverflow and the problem.
Why Fridays? Because usually the Fridays are less intense than other weekdays, And on most companies less stressful. I definitely wouldn’t recommend trying this on a Monday :-)
It sounds trivial. It isn’t :-) It is a lot harder than it looks. At least it was for me.
When starting, I didn’t have problem with writing the code or thinking through the problems. My skills didn’t atrophy as much yet. Problem was that I kept reaching for my trusted helper and a sidekick. You have no idea how many times I’ve opened an AI chat window. Even worse, I kept using AI without realising it. I have GitHub Copilot in VS Code and it was “autocompleting” whole chunks of code for me until I noticed this and realized that this needs to be paused as well.
That’s the sneaky part. AI is so baked into our tools that turning them off takes a deliberate practice. So much so that I’m contemplating of building a simple toolbar app to help me enforce “No AI Fridays”.
This is my second No AI Friday, and let me tell you, it is still challenging but easier than the first one. First one was awful.
How do you actually start?
I’m going to list a few things that helped me get started. Or that I wished I’d done from the start:
- Start slow. Leave the “easy” work for Friday. Small bug fixes, minor refactoring, a feature which doesn’t require deep thinking or complex problem-solving. Something akin to leaving a failing test before you go on vacation. It’s more important to get started than proving a point that you are still master of your skills.
- Prepare your environment. Audit your tools and check your editor for AI extensions, plugins or inline completions. They are integrated seamlessly into a lot of tools and takes a great effort to recognize them and to disable them.
- Remove the temptation. Close the chat tabs. Close CLI and desktop apps. Better yet, block the URLs of AI tools and websites you usually rely on.
Does this trend have a future?
I believe we’ll soon see a variant of Show HN for tools, websites and apps built without the AI.
Some communities have already started and drawing lines. Some subreddits (like r/opensource), ban showcasing projects built with AI entirely or vibecoded. Others, (like r/golang) ask for clear disclosure.
I think “built without AI” will become recognized and valued, much the same way as “handmade” is in the physical world.
I’m not anti-AI. I’ll be back hanging with my AI sidekick on Monday. But I want to be the engineer who uses AI because it’s faster. Not because I can’t do it myself.
** AI should be a tool, not a crutch. So you owe yourself to put it down for at least one day a week and prove to yourself you can still build without it.**
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