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Adam – The Developer says he could review code written with AI but struggled to recreate a familiar Go HTTP handler from memory. His essay, published July 13, 2026, is a personal account of the difference he felt between recognizing code and producing it—not proof that AI causes developers to lose skills.
What happened when he tried to write a Go handler?
Adam says he began using AI around mid-2024 and let it write much of his code. Later, when he sat down to build an HTTP handler in Go from scratch, he hesitated over basic steps such as registering a route and starting a server. He could recognize and review familiar patterns, but found it difficult to reconstruct the handler from memory.
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That experience anchors his essay, “I Could Review It. I Couldn’t Write It,” published on DEV Community on July 13, 2026. It captures the author’s own account, not a controlled test of his skills before and after AI.
Why distinguish reviewing code from writing it?
In Adam’s telling, reviewing a solution and creating one are different activities. A developer may be able to follow what a handler does or point out a problem once the code is in front of them, yet still struggle to produce the same structure without a prompt or example. The essay treats that gap as a reason to consider which engineering tasks a developer wants to keep practicing.
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Adam argues that working through mistakes, debugging, failed designs and trade-offs can teach lessons that are harder to gain by receiving a finished solution. That is his interpretation of his experience, rather than an independently established finding about how every developer learns.
How did he change his use of AI?
A few months before publishing, Adam says he began writing distributed-systems algorithms in Go from scratch without AI, then asking AI to review his work. He gives two reasons: to strengthen his Go skills and to write algorithm explanations that address edge cases and failure modes.
This approach puts the attempt before the assistance: the developer first makes design choices and works through the problem, then uses AI as a reviewer. It is not a claim that this is the right workflow for every task, but it shows how Adam chose to keep practicing while continuing to use AI.
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Is the essay an argument against AI coding?
No. Adam says he uses AI, values code review, and sees AI as a thinking partner. His point is about using it intentionally: if a particular skill matters to you, you may want to continue exercising it rather than outsourcing every opportunity to do so.
He also says the pattern of leaning on ready-made answers predates generative AI, pointing to Stack Overflow, copied frameworks and tutorials. That context matters to his argument: AI is one possible source of assistance, not the only way a developer can avoid working through a solution personally.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What does this account establish—and what does it not?
- It establishes what Adam reports: he could review code patterns but struggled to recreate a Go handler from memory, then chose to practice distributed-systems algorithms before asking AI for review.
- It does not establish a general causal effect: the essay offers no named statistics or quantified study showing that AI use makes developers’ skills decline.
- Its examples remain the author’s: references to PostgreSQL’s engineering history and an agent-assisted rewrite using Rust are examples in the essay, not independently verified evidence of architecture or performance benefits.
Adam summarizes his position with the line, “The skills you practice will grow. The skills you outsource will weaken.” Read as the essay’s argument, it is a prompt for reflection—not a measured prediction about every developer. His question is: “The question isn’t whether you can write without AI. The question is: Will you?”
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