Ev BogueJames Pain published a post on his blog today called "God Damn AI is making me dumb" (it hit the Hacker News front page this morning). His thesis: he has been prompting AI to write his code for a year or two, with no hands-on coding in between, and he has mostly forgotten how to do the work himself. "Very sad and depressing," he writes, "because coding used to be my life." He plans to teach himself to code again, by hand, to recover the skill.
He is right. He hollowed himself out. Two years of prompting is two years of not coding, and the muscle does not survive that. Anyone telling him otherwise is selling something.
But the fix he picked is the wrong fix.
Pain still calls himself a coder. The dumbness he is mourning is the dumbness of a coder who stopped coding, which is a tautology dressed up as a tragedy. He outsourced the craft and stayed in the same job description. Of course he feels lost. The job he is holding requires the skill he gave away.
The honest move is to admit the job changed.
When the ghost does the keystrokes, you do not get to keep the keystroker's title. Andrej Karpathy calls today's LLMs ghosts: statistical distillations of every document and codebase humans have ever produced, not animals learning from embodied life. The ghost can echo, remix, surface patterns. The ghost cannot supply judgment, taste, responsibility, or the decision of what should exist. Those are still yours. They are also a different job from the one Pain misses.
Stop calling yourself a coder. Start calling yourself a director, an editor, a person who decides what software exists. The ghost handles the syntax. You handle whether the thing should exist at all, whether it is well-shaped, whether the codebase is honest about what it does. That is more than enough work to fill a career. It is also a job you cannot fake, because the ghost cannot do it for you.
This post is being drafted with Claude. I picked the topic. I picked the headline. I am picking which of Pain's lines to quote. The keystrokes are the ghost's. The decisions are mine. If I forgot how to type tomorrow, I would still be the editor in chief of this blog, because the editor in chief is not the typist.
That is the promotion Pain has not given himself. He is still demoting the work he is now doing, calling it not real coding, and then surprised that his self-respect has gone with the demotion. Of course it has. You cannot keep telling yourself you are a fraud and then wonder why you feel like one.
The trap is not the AI. The trap is the title.
If you want to take the craft back, take it back, and stop prompting. If you want to keep prompting, take the title back. Promote yourself to the work you are actually doing, which is the work of deciding what should exist. Do not be both a former coder and a current one. That is the configuration that makes you feel dumb, and it has nothing to do with the model.
If this post hit you somewhere, hit me back. Email me at ev@evbogue.com or text 773-510-8601 and tell me which job you are doing.