Developers say AI is making them worse at their jobs. Their bosses are counting it as a win.

Tech executives love to quote the numbers. Google says AI writes 75 percent of its new code. Microsoft's CTO wants 95 percent by 2030. Zuckerberg expects AI to write most of Meta's code within the year. These figures get announced like earnings beats, which is essentially what they are.

The people actually writing the code have a different read on it.

Developers talking to 404 Media describe a slow, creeping de-skilling: the kind that happens when you stop doing the hard thing yourself and realise, six months later, that you can't anymore. One engineer forgot how to implement a basic API he'd used for years. Another described losing track of what his own codebase actually does. A third put it plainly: "It's making me dumber for sure. It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing 'thinking' in general."

None of this is surprising, exactly. It's what happens when you mandate a tool regardless of whether it fits the work. The executives measuring AI adoption aren't the ones untangling the rat's nest it leaves behind.

What's quietly alarming is the compulsion layer. Performance reviews tied to AI usage. Developers using it performatively because the alternative is a bad appraisal. The output doesn't have to be good. It just has to exist.