I’ve been using AI heavily as a software engineer, and honestly, it feels a bit strange.

I’m a software engineer, probably somewhere between mid-level+ and senior, and recently I’ve been using tools like Codex for a large part of my work - including complex tasks. It saves me a lot of time, makes me more efficient, and in many cases it even suggests cleaner or better implementations than I would have written manually at first. My workflow has changed a lot. Instead of writing every line of code myself, I now spend more time defining the task clearly, reviewing the implementation, checking the diff, testing the logic, making adjustments, and preparing merge requests. On one hand, this feels incredibly powerful. On the other hand, it feels weird. Sometimes I wonder if this can lead to degradation as a developer, because I’m writing less (almost 0) code by hand than before. I still understand and review what gets built, but the process is completely different from how software development felt even a year ago. I’m also building my own projects, and AI has become a huge part of that as well. Things that used to feel unrealistic for one person to build now feel possible. A year ago, this workflow would have sounded almost impossible. Now it feels like reality. I’m curious how other developers see this. Do you think using AI this heavily makes you a weaker developer over time, or is this simply the next stage of software engineering?