[Oia1]

I recently stopped using AI directly in my code editor, and I've felt similarly. However I have noticed I regain the lost syntax knowledge very fast. I think at the end of the day our jobs aren't to memorize syntax, that comes, goes, and changes with the tech we use. Our jobs are rather to have the knowledge needed to engineer software, and AI is just another assistant. I will continue to have it off in my IDE for a few more weeks, but I don't fear the loss of syntax knowledge (to a certain extent)

[PaulHoule]

I am in the habit of becoming very familiar with the contents of the official language manuals and learning up how to look answers up there. Often I even look at very basic pages like

https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#formatspec

because I don't have it all memorized. I avoid stack overflow because it's frequently wrong

If someone has a CS education I don't expect them to have the algorithm book memorized but I do expect them to be able to know what is in the algorithm book and how to use it, not to mention any other thing that's in the literature. (Lately I've been writing a chess program which is pretty easy if you read https://www.chessprogramming.org/Main_Page but something I couldn't do on my own.)

I use Copilot a lot at work. This morning I had to write some complicated tests with Mockito and rather than looking at the docs I asked Copilot a lot of questions, showed it sample of my code, it make me examples like you'd see in Stack Overflow except they were (1) personalized to me and (2) correct. If I don't like the code it shows me I tell it "I'd rather initialize the mocks inside the @Test" and it does that. Once it's shown me a pattern, I might change it a bit to make it my own and then replicate it.

I had Copilot write me a simple CMD.EXE script which I haven't done since the days of DOS. Some of it looked like line noise to me and I asked it what it did and I got a good answer and had more faith in the script.

So I don't feel like AI has diminished me as a programmer at all.