The Most Dangerous Problem With Using AI for Coding

13 Jul 2025 #coding

There’s good laziness and bad laziness.

One day, the VP of a company I was contracting with called me “lazy.” That was a compliment. You know the lazy that finds an easy way to solve a problem. The good lazy way.

But AI is turning us into bad lazy. The “I don’t want to think” kind of lazy. And I don’t want that type.

I’ve been experimenting with AI for my coding. When I sit down to code, I open Copilot on a browser to see what I can offload.

Recently, I’ve been migrating a legacy Visual Basic app and I’ve used Copilot to code faster by helping me with boring tasks.

The problem? Last week, I was stuck on a stupid problem: finding a value in a dictionary from a list of possible keys. Maybe I needed some rest, but I couldn’t think of a LINQ query for that. I was so tempted to wake up the genie in the bottle for that. It felt like the easy way out.

It’s so tempting to go directly to the AI and outsource our thinking.

Just the other day, I found a coder desperate because he couldn’t code without AI anymore. If we’re not careful enough, any one of us could become that coder.