"One month without AI" by Manuel Bustillo
These kinds of post will give you a starting point for sharing thought-provoking and critical content in various environments (like in a #random Slack channel at your workplace).
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https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html
Think
The blog post illustrates the experience of a software developer who - in earnest - tried out LLMs for their daily work. From conversations we had it matches what other people in the industry experience, to varying degrees.
What we also see, however, is that in many cases the negative is chalked up to personal discipline, i.e. a kind of "You're using it wrong", when we'd argue that the kind of exhaustion, loss of skills and performative approach to work as it is outlined in the blog post is a natural result of LLM usage.
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Quotes
At some point, I had so many AI agents working, that the focus change was too much for me. [...] And maybe AI and computers are good at context switching, but not me. I was exhausted. Because if it was just about approving PRs that are perfectly written, it would be good. But for each PR I had to look at the code, the tests, the style, give feedback, switch to something else, go back again, push, see if I have any PR comments, if CI passed, wait, now the linter complains. [...] In my personal experience, multiplied AI performance is just an illusion. Multiplied frustration and exhaustion is guaranteed, though.
[...] it made sure there was a 7-paragraph description in the PR, explaining what it had done. I stopped reading those descriptions, like, I told it what to do, I assume it did what I said. The description is for others. Because there has to be a description, right? AI is so fucking good as sounding professional, that you relax and let it be. It’s not that I actually thought the code was good, but you get convinced over time, you get lazy, you become complacent.
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 [...] 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. [...] I am pushing significant changes every day, getting PRs merged, and at the end of the day, getting the work done. And for that reason, I’m not scared of being fired. Plus, I’m keeping my brain functions intact.
Reactions
Basically no reactions except for two people putting the "NoAI" emoji (moominpappa) below the post.