I'm done using AI – Brett Codes

I'm done using AI

10 Aug, 2026

I've been programming for 20 years. It started as a hobby as a teen, making fansites and little video games. Then it turned into a career. And it's something I've largely enjoyed doing. I like learning, I like problem solving, and I like making things, which is a lot of what programming is. Over the past 18 months, my career, my hobby, and my craft have been drastically changed by the introduction of LLM-powered coding harnesses (e.g., Claude Code) and what's often referred to as "agentic programming." Because of its negative impacts on the environment, society, and my mental health, I've decided to stop using it.

▶ Watch a ramble video version of this post.

I first became aware of using LLMs for programming a few years ago through GitHub's Copilot integration in Visual Studio Code, which was like autocomplete on steroids. You'd start typing function sortNames and it'd show you a preview of what that implementation could look like. I tried it and found it distracting and basically useless. The second time it reared its head was the early chat interfaces. A colleague was using it to help investigate an issue and the solution the LLM provided them with wasn't working. Turns out that the LLM hallucinated a version of a software library that didn't exist, and therefore couldn't be installed nor used to fix the issue.

Around this time, at that job, a true believer of AI was hired as the head of the product team. They were a product manager who began submitting changes, using the LLM-powered coding tools but without understanding the implications to the broader system. Conversations became focused on how to integrate AI into the software that the customers used. I was watching it spread like a virus throughout that organization, while I continued programming away as I had for the decades before, writing tests and building features, and largely enjoying the work.

At a newer job, the job I have now as I write this, I continued to code how I had my entire life. Writing TypeScript, Ruby, CSS, etc. and corresponding tests, integrating with other systems and depdnencies. It's a small team of less than 10 developers. On collaborative calls, I'd see how some of my colleagues utilized AI in the Cursor editor, quickly tab completing the code and sometimes prompting it inline to write some code. The LLM-powered coding tooling at that time was largely working at a local-to-that-file, small scale. I thought it was neat, almost magical, but nothing would pry me away from Neovim and tmux, and I felt like I was working fast enough anyway.

I didn't, and I still don't, see the need for working faster. I really like what Cal Newport encourages in his book Slow Productivity: work at a natural pace.

In early 2025 I was asked a question by management: "what do you think of this AI coding stuff?" And I said "it's often wrong, gets in my way, and doesn't help me code faster, so I don't use it." Management would not long after attend a conference and be sold on how LLMs would change everything we know about knowledge work, revolutionizing the workplace. This then led to a mandate to make use of AI tools or be left behind.

I decided to give AI a go, in earnest. I tried the Cursor editor, but it didn't click with me and ran horribly on Linux. So I tried Zed, and pretty soon thereafter I was utilizing the sidebar chat with auto-edit to have the LLMs make changes to the code and build software. At that time, it honestly felt magical. Type into a box and the thing would write code and answer my questions. During mid-2025, agentic editing became the new way to use AI for coding, replacing the auto-complete-based workflows. As the AI companies invested in training models tuned for that purpose and building coding harnesses, the capabilities kept getting better and better.

Fast forward a year to mid-2026. In the lead up to my decision to stop using AI, I was able to essentially connect Linear to Claude Code and have it build out a non-trivial project from start to finish without me editing a line of code. The work gone done faster than I could have done on my own. And I barely had to think. While that sounds amazing if you're a person who profits from more work getting done, there are immense drawbacks to this, which I'll share more about in a moment. I share this anecdote to say: I understand what the LLM-based coding harnesses are capable of. I write this all from the perspective of an experienced lead engineer who used these tools in earnest for more than a year. And I cannot in good conscious continue to use AI for coding (or anything else) any longer.

During the time when I started using the LLM coding tools, I also started to use the chat functionality. I'd ask it to recommend me books. I'd ask for career advice. I'd float business ideas by it. I talked to it like it was a friend. I'd come up with grand ideas, and it was always supportive. And I'd ask it for...