I went all in on AI coding tools and became incredibly productive. Then I lost my job and could not write a for loop.
In August 2025, I started using LLMs to code. A bit of ChatGPT here and there, then I started using Cursor more aggressively, and right after that I started using Claude Code. It was such an amazing feeling. I was hooked and I wanted to build more things, both at work and on my own time. Even after my full-time job hours finished, I stayed up late prompting Claude Code to build apps. I built DanbingAI , DecodeThisText , and a few other apps. It was a crazy feeling to be able to build an app from scratch over the weekend and have it live on the internet. The speed was incredible. Even at my full-time job I was just building fast. At a certain point I was only testing to see if things worked and was barely looking at the code besides a quick glance to make sure there were no security issues and that the AI had not accidentally committed our environment variables to GitHub. The excitement was crazy but I knew something was off. I could feel it. I just could not make much sense of it at the time.
The company I was working with was not stable. I had previously worked with the co-founder the year prior and something had gone wrong, forcing him to shut the company down suddenly with no warning. He told us to wait and that he would start a new company and get funding. He eventually did, and at the start of this new company he did a mass hiring which I thought was kind of weird. This was a brand new company with no solid roadmap or product built yet, and that was definitely not the startup way. I brought it up but I do not think he wanted anyone pointing that out. Either way, I worked for this company knowing it was not very stable and that something sudden and unexpected could happen again, just like before. If it did happen it would be even worse because the previous company only had around four developers, while this new one had around twenty developers and other non-technical employees.
Well, somewhere in between prompting and building, I forgot about the unstable company and got lost in the thrill of shipping with LLMs. Then December 2025 rolled around, which was around the same time the year prior when things had gone wrong at the other company. The co-founder was acting pretty strange and I had a bad feeling that history was about to repeat itself. I brought it up with my co-workers who had also been at the previous company. Two of us started polishing our resumes because we had a bad feeling something was coming. Then Christmas came and we got time off. New Year passed and it was time to come back to work, but suddenly there was a message in the #general channel on Slack saying that we had all worked very hard in 2025 and deserved another two weeks off. That was very strange. And that is when I realized something far more alarming.
I had fixed my resume, reached out to a recruiter and got an interview with a company. That is when I was given a live coding interview. It was an easy LeetCode problem. I had not done LeetCode in a while and, honestly, I had not really coded on my own in the last six months because I was going all in on LLMs as a so-called 10x productive software engineer. I embarrassed myself in that interview. To be fair, they caught me off guard. It was the first interview and I thought it was more of a cultural fit conversation since the recruiter had not mentioned there would be technical questions, let alone live coding. It was also an interview at 1 am when my usual sleep time was 10 pm. My brain was just not there. But when put on the spot I realized I could not even write a for loop. I knew how to solve the problem at the pseudocode level but I could not write actual code. That was horrible. The most horrible feeling ever. I had been coding since I was ten years old. It had been pure muscle memory for over two decades. I could code for hours without Googling or searching for answers, and now I could not write a for loop.
Then it happened. My co-worker, who had seen it coming, warned me that any day now I was going to get the news as this looks similar to last the prior year. Then one day, the co-founder messaged me and all my co-workers privately that the company was closing and I was being let go effective immediately with everyone else in the company.