As junior full-stack developer working and finishing my master’s degree at the same time, I found the AI tools extremely powerful mainly to cheat at school and lie on my applications.
But why?
First of all, I was lucky. I was so lucky that the ChatGPT came in my second year of college. I already had fundamentals of programming, discrete math, algebra and basic structures and algorithms. Also at the beginning the “help” of Chat was very limited, the responses it gave me were somewhat useful, but it was still my responsibility to connect these dots to the correct form to create some program or to solve some assignments we got then.
But later, all you need was just type semi-good prompt and the whole assignment, ment for weeks was done in no time. What this did to me?
First, I found it really exciting, this meant that I am going to finish my education without any difficulties and frankly, this was more or less true. Many courses were just 2 or 3 prompts away of successfully finishing them. And it went like this until the end of undergraduate studies. I managed to secure job in my final year as undergrad as full-stack developer using mainly Laravel and Vue in applications but soon my responsibilities grew a bit and now I have to communicate with clients, take the security aspect of every commit very seriously, since we are in bank and insurance sector, where mistakes are just too dangerous.
After few months in the job I found that this approach - AI first - is not sustainable and that if I really want to do this, move forward in my career, deliver sustainable results and secure implementations, I have to change the core part of my behaviour as developer, student and to be honest, person as well.
I started actively searching for help, firstly only at Youtube and blogs like these, but then I told everything to my friends and find out, I am not alone.
There is something, I think many people can feel it, something almost repelent on vibe coding, AI tools that are misused, shift in the brain power of people using these tools. It is hard to explain, but I think if you are this far in this text, you know what I mean by this.
I started from the scratch again. I am currently trying to avoid these tools if possible, I went back to my old project the were just prompted to be finished and learn the basics again.
One thing that really helped me, was to create Obsidian vault that is basically my **Knowledge Base **- place to store all useful information you learned, found, used or observed. In my opinion the thing that can separate junior from senior developer is his Knowledge Base, because you have to go through so much stuff in those years that you just have to store it somewhere and then, if needed retrieve it easily.
I strongly recommend the same for you, keep looking for information instead of asking AI, try to comprehend the problem you are solving (if possible) and only when you are “master” in the matter then maybe you can try to automate some parts with AI. You should also try to go to the basics again. Try to read some math book or documentation to your framework or language.
Try to think about it as training for you brain, you will be happier if you could start over and do it right.
And that is exactly what I am trying now. Let me know in comment if you can relate to this.

DavidDev

A junior full-stack developer shares a personal account of over-relying on AI tools like ChatGPT throughout college, using them to complete assignments with minimal effort. After landing a job in the banking and insurance sector, they realized this 'AI-first' approach was unsustainable and harmful to their actual skill development. They describe the process of starting over, avoiding AI tools where possible, revisiting fundamentals, and building a personal knowledge base in Obsidian to store and retrieve learned information. The post encourages developers to understand problems deeply before reaching for AI automation.

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