The other side of the story maybe it didn’t kill my brain, just upgraded it

Introduction:

AI didn’t kill my coding brain it upgraded the firmware

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece called “AI killed my coding brain but I’m rebuilding it”, where I unpacked how LLMs like ChatGPT made me feel… well, kinda useless as a developer. Like my skills were rusting while AI autocompleted my thoughts before I even had them. It was a raw post the kind you write when you’re staring at your screen, wondering if the machine is now the better engineer.

But now that the dust has settled and the existential crisis has cooled down to a simmer, I’ve got a new perspective. What if AI didn’t kill our coding brains at all?
What if plot twist it just rewired them?

You see, something strange has happened. I’m not spending my day Googling the same 3 StackOverflow threads anymore. I’m not manually writing out boilerplate config files I’ve already written ten times. Instead, I’m thinking bigger, solving higher-level problems, and actually… enjoying the process again.

This article is the other side of that first story a hopeful, hands-on look at how AI is actually saving my dev brain by letting it skip the boring parts and focus on the fun stuff.
This isn’t techno-optimism. It’s dev survival.
Let’s talk about how AI became my favorite debugging partner, my stack overflow replacement, and the co-pilot I didn’t know I needed.

The boring stuff was always killing us

Let’s be real some parts of coding suck the soul out of you.

Setting up a new project and writing the same old vite.config.js?
Wrestling with CORS for the hundredth time?
Massaging a REST API response into the format your frontend actually wants?

This is the kind of work that doesn’t make you a better engineer — it just makes you tired. And here’s where AI swoops in like a helpful NPC that offers to auto-complete the fetch quest so you can go back to slaying dragons.

The truth is, this kind of low-level repetition has always been a grind. We just tolerated it because we had no better tools. But now? I can fire off a half-decent prompt and have a working CRUD layout scaffolded faster than I can say “boilerplate.”

And I still read that code. I still tweak it. I still understand it.
But I don’t have to suffer through writing it line by line.

It’s not cheating it’s delegation.
It’s not being lazy it’s being strategic.

Coding is a creative sport. The more we automate the grunt work, the more mental space we have for solving the fun problems the real logic, architecture, UX polish, and edge cases that actually matter.

If you’re still doing 80% of your dev work by hand and calling it “purity,” you’re not flexing skill you’re cosplaying pain.

AI helps us zoom out

Before AI copilots, my brain used to be stuck in the weeds. I’d spend hours tinkering with a single function, trying to wrangle edge cases like I was coding with tweezers. I wasn’t thinking like an engineer I was just surviving the compiler.

Now? I zoom out.

AI handles the scaffolding, the setup, and the boilerplate so I can step back and ask bigger questions:

• Does this design scale?
• Are we solving the right user pain?
• Is this even the right architecture?

I’ve caught myself thinking more like a system designer and less like a syntax monkey. I spend less time writing functions, more time shaping flows. And ironically, I understand more about the codebase now than I did when I was micromanaging every forEach.

Remember when we moved from jQuery to React and it felt like we could finally organize our thoughts?
This feels like that but on steroids.

In a way, AI didn’t just make me faster. It made me more strategic.
I’m not writing map() and reduce() I’m thinking about user journeys, backend reliability, and where AI can handle grunt work next.

Zooming out doesn’t mean I’m coding less it means I’m coding smarter.

I’m learning through AI now

Let’s kill a myth real quick: using AI doesn’t mean you stop learning.
In fact, I’m learning more now just in real-time, inside context, and without opening 13 tabs.

AI’s not just a code monkey. It’s a tutor, a debugger, a rubber duck with infinite patience.
I’ve thrown the weirdest Python errors at ChatGPT and gotten not just the fix, but an explanation of why it broke. I’ve asked it to explain recursion like I’m five and then again like I’m Linus Torvalds. Both times? I got answers that made sense.

It’s like Stack Overflow, but if Stack Overflow actually wanted to help you and didn’t yell at you for duplicating a question from 2013.

Old way: hit a bug, Google it, read three outdated blog posts, try five fixes, pray.
New way: ask the AI, get a fix, get why it works, move on smarter.

And here’s the kicker: the more I use AI, the better I get at prompting.
And better prompts force me to understand what I’m asking, what I expect, and how to get there. It’s learning disguised as productivity.

So no, I’m not outsourcing my brain. I’m just feeding it faster.

I still need to think AI isn’t God

Let’s not get it twisted AI’s not a wizard. It’s a mirror.
If you feed it garbage, it gives you… polished garbage. Fancy, well-indented, syntactically correct trash.

This means the thinking part? Still mine.
If I write a vague prompt, I get vague code. If I don’t understand the problem, AI sure as hell won’t solve it for me.
It’s like having a really enthusiastic intern who works fast but has no clue what you actually want unless you’re super clear.

The moment I stopped blaming ChatGPT for bad answers and started fixing my questions…
…was the moment I leveled up as a dev.

It’s made me realize that being a good developer now means being a good communicator.
You can’t just “think in code” you have to explain it clearly. Which, spoiler alert, is also how you get better at design docs, PR reviews, and team discussions.

So yeah, I still need to think more than ever.
AI just raised the floor, not the ceiling. And to hit that ceiling? You gotta climb.

The new developer stack includes language

Let’s face it knowing how to code isn’t enough anymore.
You also need to know how to talk to your tools.

Prompting isn’t some side gimmick it’s the new command line.
It’s your gateway to unlocking a smarter IDE, a context-aware debugger, and a pseudo-mentor that can answer anything from “what’s the time complexity of this function” to “how do I politely tell my manager this feature is stupid?”

Before: Write code.
Now: Write a prompt that writes code and then rewrite the prompt better.
Tomorrow: Collaborate with AI like it’s a junior dev with unlimited coffee and zero ego.

This shift doesn’t make devs obsolete. It amplifies the ones who adapt.
If you’ve got a strong foundation in logic, system design, and clean communication congrats, you’re now AI-enhanced.
And if you don’t? Well… AI’s a great place to start learning.

We’re not replacing technical depth we’re combining it with expressive clarity.
The best devs today are part-coder, part-instructor, part-language artist.
It’s not about how fast you can type it’s about how clearly you can think.

Less ego, more collaboration

Remember when every dev Twitter thread was about being a “10x engineer” who codes in the dark, eats Vim shortcuts for breakfast, and hates meetings?
Yeah… that era’s over. And thank God.

AI has humbled us all and honestly, that’s a good thing.

Now, instead of flexing how much we know, we’re getting comfortable admitting what we don’t.
We’re Googling less because we’re prompting more.
We’re reviewing AI-generated code with the same critical eye we’d use for a teammate.
And sometimes, we’re even learning from the machine without pretending we “already knew that.”

AI doesn’t replace the team it joins it.
And unlike that one senior dev who never comments code, it actually responds when you ask “why?”

The best devs I know are no longer lone wolves. They’re collaborators with humans and with machines.
They ask better questions. They test more assumptions. They build faster by letting go of ego and embracing tools that make the work smoother.

This isn’t the death of craftsmanship.
It’s the rebirth of curiosity and AI just happens to be our weird, brilliant new coworker.

Conclusion: AI didn’t kill my coding brain it made it evolve

Here’s the twist: AI didn’t replace me. It refined me.

It stripped away the noise the tedious stuff I used to dread and made space for real thinking. It pushed me to clarify my ideas, communicate better, and focus on the work that actually matters. And yes, it rewired my brain a bit not to be lazy, but to be leaner, smarter, and way more strategic.

I used to fear AI would turn developers into button-pushers.
Turns out, it’s making us creative directors of our own workflows.
We’re building, thinking, and learning faster and with less ego dragging us down.

So to everyone stuck in doom spiral mode:
AI isn’t the end of real dev work. It’s the beginning of doing it better.
It didn’t kill your coding brain. It just offloaded the parts that were never fun to begin with.

And if you still think real devs don’t use AI…
Just wait ’til me and my LLM launch another weekend side project before your test suite finishes running.

Helpful resources

• AI killed my coding brain but I’m rebuilding it” (the original)
• Prompt Engineering Guide
• GitHub Copilot & the future of coding
• OpenAI GPT-4o Release
• AI coding assistants showdown (VS Code, Cursor, Copilot)