One month without AI
https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html
The sweet start
A friend told me hey, you should try it, you feel so powerful. Once you start using it, you cannot stop. The tasks that took you days, you can have them in hours. No, we’re not talking about cocaine, although to some degree I consider the use of AI, an addiction.
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One day, I saw the agent was co-signing the commits I was making, and I ran to opt-out from that setting. Like, I wanted to pretend the code was my own. Gosh.
Losing control
It would not be so bad if things had stopped there, but that’s not how most human brains work. If you like something and you can have 2x, you’ll have it. I started pasting the whole Jira description of a ticket, and let AI implement it for me...I started losing control over which changes were really needed to fulfill the task.
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But it also didn’t stop there. When I had a small task, I gave it to the AI, and in ~30 minutes I had a PR. What was I doing during those 30 minutes? Changing focus. Soon I realized I could have not one, but multiple agents working on different tasks simultaneously, in multiple git worktrees. Full power! Tokenmaxxing!
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Months passed by, and one day I realized I had not written a single line of code myself in several months. I didn’t even commit myself. Countless times I’ve written in the AI agent chat “commit and push”. What. The. Hell. If that is not laziness, I don’t know what it is. AI was also not able to solve all the tasks that I gave it. Not even half of them. Once and again, I had to babysit the AI agent saying “now, apply this pattern” or “in the specs, separate the test setup in a before block, and add the assertions in a different block”. Like I was mentoring a junior. Don’t get me wrong, I love mentoring, I’ve done it for years, and I think it was good for the mentor and the mentee. But I’m not going to fucking babysit a machine, sorry.
Regaining control
One month ago, in a code review of one of my PRs, a coworker said something like “this test you’ve written doesn’t actually test the scenario that you’re changing in the application code”. I reviewed it, and he was right. But… it was so convincing… And I felt shameful. Because for me, a developer who had been using TDD for 10+ years, failing on something so basic was a bit of a humiliation. I realized I had lost control, and it was not going to get any better.
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So I decided I would stop using AI. Even if that costs me my job.
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I went back to TDD, to my PRs with just 5 files changed. To my 2-line PR descriptions that were straight to the point. I went back to understanding what I was doing, to deploying with confidence, to being ready for a detailed code review, because I knew what the changes were doing, and I could justify every line of code. I went back to enjoying human code reviews (not AI-ones, I still hate those. Even more humans that paste AI reviews pretending they are their own), to learning from them. I started asking about architectural decisions, why things were a certain way. I could have asked AI, but I preferred to ask my peers.
I recovered the joy of programming. And I didn’t look back. I won’t pretend that number of lines of code or PRs is a valid metric, especially when AI can be as verbose as it wants to win on every metric.
A piece of advice
Say no to drugs. Kind of a metaphor, but not quite. The first step is to realize how dependentweyou are on AI. A piece of technology that you don’t control, and which costs your employer (if not you) a fortune. You’ll say but my manager expects a high performance from me, how am I going to underperform now? I cannot speak for you, but that didn’t happen to me. I don’t think I underperform compared to 2 months ago. If anything, I am now more aware of what I’m doing, more capable of responding to an incident if there is one (because hey, I wrote the code that fucked up), and the more I (literally, me) work on the codebase, the better developer I become. That is what your manager should want from you.