For the past five months I have been coding almost exclusively with AI coding assistants, and I am worried how it has affected my brain. First, some quick backstory.

While taking an extended “break” from a 9-5 job, I started Roam, a social network focused on off road exploration in vehicles. It’s like Strava but for things you do in your car. This is an idea I had last winter and decided to dedicate a few months to hammering out a proof of concept. So from February until late June I have been working nearly every day on Roam, almost exclusively with AI assistance.

I’m not alone. Before I left Coinbase, the culture was already shifting to where we were expected to work this way. As I have kept up conversation with my developer friends, it has become essentially the norm, and everyone is being pressed to find greater productivity using AI coding tools.

Now, to a serial startup founder like myself, the velocity with which you can vomit out code with AI assistance is like a powerful, habit-forming drug. In February, when Claude Code beta was released, it was like I had found crack cocaine for the first time. My daily binge would consist of visualizing product features and then seeing it materialize in front of my eyes in record speed. I think the kids refer to this as vibe coding. The feeling of momentum propells you along in an unstoppable rage of coding.

If you’re an experienced coder, somewhat discerning, familiar with your language, framework, and intimately familiar with your goals, this working style can be surprisingly sustainable. The output is usable in production and not total garbage.

However, after a few months of working like this I began to get very discontent with coding. It was hard to debug exactly why, because from the outside I was living my dream: working on a startup, in a domain that I liked, at breakneck pace, able to grind through relatively immense scope without outside help.

Last week I realized that I had not actually written a line of code myself in weeks. If I wanted to I could go days without even opening an editor, instead just reviewing and refining diffs with Claude Code in the terminal. Iterating endlessly with a bot which would tirelessly generatethe code for me for the low low fee of $200 per month.

I have always held the belief, right or wrong, that coding is an expression of my true self. In other words, art. It’s represents core values of my personality – curiosity, love of problem solving, belief in stewardship and craft. And, because I’m broken in certain ways, it’s also a way that I’ve learned to connect with real people. My very first online friend as a teen was someone with whom I practiced coding.

Fortunately for my career, at some point along the line, I was able to translate coding into “software engineering.” The concurrence of a sustainable living with the ability to produce art (if not every day, frequently enough to keep me sane) has kept my psychology content and happy for quite a while, until recently. It turns out that initial rush of being able to produce code at breakneck speeds was more of a bubble than real life. Now that the bubble has popped, it’s left me feeling a great emptiness.

I wonder if some “actual artists” (as in, those people who create the kind of art most people would recognize) have gone through a similar arc of realizing the emptiness of creating with AI tools. Certainly some writers have. Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is the same, in order to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. The machine can't do it for me.

Therefore I am uninstalling Claude Code and its ilk from my personal computer. Of course, now that the genie is out of the bottle within the IT industry, and pretty much everywhere else, you and I have no choice but to utilize these tools in our professional lives. Adapt or die. There's no going back. But for personal projects—Roam, open source projects, personal utilities and scripts—those will continue to be written by hand like I always have.

From brain to fingers to compiler. Test, debug, and repeat.