You are faster than ever. For how long?
The craft you have stopped practicing is the craft you are quietly losing.
- The track
- Writes code
- The rep
- About thirty seconds
- Published
- September 2, 2026
The Exhibit
You are faster with the AI on. That is real, and nobody is asking you to pretend otherwise. It was never the interesting question. The interesting question is what happens to the part of the craft you have stopped doing yourself. A 666-person study found that the more people offloaded their thinking to AI, the lower they scored on critical thinking. The study.
Survey data, correlational, so read it as a pattern and not a proof. But you know the pattern from the inside: the code ships faster while the part of you that used to reason it out sits quiet. Fast today. The question is how long the skill stays yours when the tool is the one doing the reps.
The study
Comprehension Debt
Comprehension debt: the gap between what gets shipped and what the team can still reason about.
A skill you stop using does not wait at full strength for you to come back. It fades, quietly, while the work keeps shipping on schedule, and you only find out the day the tool is wrong and the reasoning is suddenly yours to do. The speed is real. The craft underneath it is the part you are quietly spending.
The idea
The Rep
Thirty seconds:
You take code that calls an API once per item, sequentially, and change it to fire every call at once. Same output, faster. What did you change about behavior under load, and when does it break?
The answer
Sequential became fully concurrent. Every call is scheduled at once and the natural backpressure of doing them one at a time is gone. The platform may still cap how many actually run in parallel, but you have given up the pacing the sequential version provided for free. Faster until the volume trips a rate limit, exhausts sockets or file descriptors, drains the connection pool, or buries the downstream service. The fix is bounded concurrency: run them in parallel but cap how many are in flight at once, instead of releasing all of them unbounded.
About thirty seconds