I have been coding for 11 years and I caught myself completely unable to debug a problem without AI assistance last month. That scared me more than anything I have seen in this industry.

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I want to be honest about something that happened to me because I think it is more common than people admit. Last month I hit a bug in a service I wrote myself two years ago. Network timeout issue, intermittent, only in prod. The kind of thing I used to be able to sit with for an hour and work through methodically. I opened Claude, described the symptom, got a hypothesis, followed it, hit a dead end, fed that back, got another hypothesis. Forty minutes later I had not found the bug. I had jus...