The Shortcut Tax: What AI Is Costing Your Career Growth
Before AI, a hard bug meant hours of digging. You read docs, tried things, failed, tried again. That struggle is what built your skill, the same way lifting weights builds muscle. The weight is the struggle. Now AI can hand you the answer in one prompt. Fast, but you skip the workout. You get the fix, not the strength. This talk is about a habit I use to keep growing while still using AI every day: I start the code myself. I write the function signature, sketch the pattern, make the hard calls about how it should work. Then I let AI finish the typing. The thinking happens first. I'll walk through real examples from my own work, including building a notification system in Go, to show what this looks like in practice. I'll also share the trap version of this: what it looks like when someone skips straight to "write me a function that does X" and never builds the muscle for the hard part.
Destiny Amba
Software engineer based in Belfast. Likes building small, practical tools that solve everyday problems, like a personal bus tracker that tells me exactly when to leave home so I'm never too early or too late. Currently learning Go and believes the best way to grow as an engineer is to build the smallest useful thing first, then let the hard parts teach you