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Hard agree. I've felt it already during outages or when I was traveling and didn't have internet on a flight, I couldn't function at the same level. I've been writing code for over 25 years, worked at the top big tech companies (still do) and it's remarkable how quickly I became dependent on AI.

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Take a week or two off a quarter to do it manually. I did it a couple weeks ago and it took about a day or two to get back into the swing of it and knock the rust off, no pun since it was TS, YMMV, but I didn't find that it was that difficult. Even in languages I don't really write routinely, as long as you use the deterministic tools (lsp, linter, etc)

Now, is my code better than the AI's equivalent implementation? No shot. It's nicer for people, artisanal hand crafted, but... there's a reason I use AI.

It's not even that I'm slower at manual coding anymore, though I very well could be, it's that my expectation of my own progress has shifted. I'll be frustrated to only get a fraction of what I could have done.

Oh, fair enough, my goal was just to preserve "if Anthropic and OpenAI are having a bad day, and the local model on my laptop is too dumb to pour water out of a pot with the instructions on the bottom, how do I fix a bug", I accepted a long time ago that my productivity is going to be 0.1x if I have to go back.

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