The Quiet Guilt of Coding with AI

Every time AI completes code for me, I feel like a fraud.

We’re in the thick of the “AI is good or bad for code” debate in the software development community. Vibe-coders praise AI for productivity gains, while skeptics caution its use for various, often valid, reasons. As someone with a day job and also a handful of side projects, I can relate to both sides, and I’m using Copilot and Cursor on the daily.

But here’s a perspective - a phenomenon - that I don’t see talked about much. I feel guilty using AI.

I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m cheating. Like I’m doing something illegal, or at least unethical. It’s difficult to articulate, but it just feels wrong.

I don’t mean this in some hyperbolic sense. When AI completes the function I was about to write in one-shot, perfectly, I feel…inadequate. Less-than. In such instances, AI is objectively making me a more productive developer, and the value I can provide to society has increased. I guess I should feel good about this. But it’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

Is it pride?

On reflection, I do feel proud that I’m capable of creating something from scratch, of building something “with my bare hands”. In some ways, the AI revolution for programming is similar to the photography revolution. To get a portrait of your family pre-cameras, you’d commission a painter. The painter would attempt to recreate your family on canvas brush and paint over hours, or days, sweating the details to produce a 1-of-1 artwork. A skill that, to do well, requires years of practice.

Now imagine handing the painter a digital camera. Instead of taking hours to produce a single portrait, they can ‘produce’ hundreds of family portraits in an hour.

Objectively, this painter-now-photographer is more efficient at their task of producing family portraits. But to them (or at least some of them), I’d guess they have a similar feeling to me: that using the camera is cheating. That if someone ‘found out’ that they were using a camera, they’d be ridiculed (not the best example, but you get the idea). That one day, they’ll be called upon to create a portrait without a camera, but they’ll have forgotten how to paint. That it betrays the reason they got into painting in the first place.

Is it my education?

The university system - perhaps to a fault - optimises for rote knowledge and the ability to complete tasks under ‘exam conditions’. Back when I was completing my engineering degree, it was common to share assignments to get a collective leg-up and save time. But to pass the course, you had to pass exams, and to pass exams, you had to be able to do stuff ‘by hand’, from scratch - writing algorithms, solving math problems and so on. Maybe I have some latent anxiety from this period, where I’m (unjustifiably) worried that one day AI will ‘go away’, and I’ll be standing there as the senior engineer with no clothes on, unable to write code.

Perhaps this all a realisation that, while AI is a net-positive for software and the world, the act of programming, the profession of software engineering, is evolving to something I just vibe less with. Commanding an AI editor to do stuff around my codebase makes me more efficient at my job, yes. But like the painters of old, I feel guilty that it’s not me putting my brush to canvas.

Clutching on to pre-AI software development approaches is clearly suboptimal. And maybe it’s on me to accept and embrace this new reality to cure my guilt. But maybe there’s something to a little guilt-free coding every once in a while, too.

Do you experience AI guilt?