The Pendulum: How to Use AI Without Losing Your Edge

Question

I used AI more last year than in any year of my career. And I got quietly worse at my job.

Not slower at everything. Slower exactly where it counted: reading unfamiliar code, catching an answer that was almost right, holding a system in my head during an incident when it’s down right now and no chat window moves fast enough.

That’s the thing about skill atrophy. It’s quiet. The AI fills the gap, the code ships, the PR merges, and you feel productive. You only notice when something breaks.

Last year something broke. I reached for the mental model I’d spent years building, the one that used to tell me where to look first, and found mist.

The pendulum

So here’s the strange place I’ve landed. I use AI more than ever, and I write code by hand more than ever. Both at once, on purpose.

That’s not a contradiction, it’s the method. A pendulum only works if it swings both ways. Let it stick to one side and it stops being a pendulum. It’s just a weight on a string.

Swinging to AI is the baseline now, not the question. The part people skip is swinging back.

It isn’t just me

Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey found trust in AI accuracy fell to 29%, down eleven points in a single year, while usage kept climbing past 80%. Sit with that shape for a second: the people using these tools the most are trusting them the least.

And the top frustration wasn’t AI being wrong. It was AI being almost right. That’s the hardest kind of wrong to catch. It compiles, it looks fine, it survives the shallow read. Catching it is exactly the muscle that goes soft first when you stop reading carefully.

The three habits

1. Write the first implementation by hand. Not the whole thing, just the first one in any new domain. You can’t review what you’ve never built.
2. One hour a week with the autocomplete off. It’s not about what you build in that hour. It’s about what the hour keeps working.
3. Read before you ask. Read the code yourself before a model explains it, especially when that’s slower. The friction is the rep.

Flat ground

The person who finally made me understand this isn’t an engineer at all. He’s a pro skater, and his channel is almost entirely him landing the plainest tricks there are, the ones you learn in your first month, over and over, on camera. Flat ground isn’t where you go backward. It’s where you keep the feel that makes the hard stuff possible.

Writing code by hand is flat ground for engineers. You’re not going back. You’re protecting what carries you forward.

The engineers who’ll matter in five years aren’t the ones who used AI the most. They’re the ones who used it while staying sharp.

Swing to AI. Swing back. Keep the pendulum moving, both directions.

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This is part three of a trilogy. Part one, AI Didn’t Take Your Job – It Revealed It, on what your job actually is. Part two, I Delegated My Thinking to AI. Now I’m Taking It Back., on flipping who leads.

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