What's it like to code without AI

Pretty quickly, when ChatGPT and Github Copilot came along, I used AI in code creation. I have created various side projects to test different ways to use these tools as efficiently as possible. And of course, I have also used them professionally.

Today, they are part of my daily life. But a few days ago, I wondered what it looked like when we coded without AI. I wanted to write a scrapper in Python, based on Requests and Beautiful Soup libs.

So I decided to write it without AI. For the occasion, I didn’t use an IDE either, just a basic Vim.

The good news is that after 3 years of AI, I still know how to code the old way. On the other hand, I discovered something that I had not suspected.

When you code, you can’t remember everything. What is the exact name of this function in this lib? Or, what exactly are its parameters?

We remember that it exists. We’ve used it before. We know how to find information. But of course, we don’t remember everything. There are too many libs and too many languages.

This is a phenomenon that often impresses beginners who think they need to memorize everything. But this is not the case. Today, AI is assisting us in this task. Before it was books, man pages, then the Internet.

Everyone sees AI assistants as tools that write code for us and are able to answer our questions. But what I noticed when coding again without AI is that you have to regularly switch between the editor and the internet. And these continual interruptions are bad for the flow.

The flow state is really important to code efficiently. And by limiting interruptions, the AI assistants that we can use in our IDE make it easy to reach a deeper state of flow.

Among the benefits of AI, this is really something I hadn’t suspected.

We are at the end of 2025. There are still people in the business who are reluctant to use AI, as if AI was going to make us worse or replace us.

LLMs lack autonomy. They are good at generating content under human supervision. But that’s all.

They will replace the code monkeys, but not the software engineers.

And given the benefits they bring us, it’s really absurd not to use these tools.

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