Here’s a thought experiment I can’t shake. Every AI coding assistant goes down at once for a week. Copilot, Claude, the chat tab, the autocomplete, all of it.

A quiet global outage, back in seven days. What happens to us?

I know exactly what my first hour looks like, because muscle memory would give me away. I’d write a function signature, pause, and wait for the grey ghost text to finish it.

Nothing would come. I’d sit there for a second longer than I’d like to admit, mildly offended, the way you jab a vending machine that ate your coin.

Day one: the phantom limb

The first day is denial. You keep reaching for something that isn’t there. Not just autocomplete. The whole outsourced layer underneath it.

The regex you’d normally describe in English and paste. The stack trace you’d normally drop into a chat and ask “what is this.”

The boilerplate you haven’t hand-written in so long you’re not certain you remember the imports. You’d discover, quickly and a little uncomfortably, how many small decisions you’d stopped making yourself.

By the afternoon you’d remember that documentation exists. Actual docs, on actual websites. You’d read them the slow way, top to bottom.

There’s no one to ask for the two lines you need. It would feel like being handed a paper map after years of turn-by-turn navigation.

Day three: the withdrawal

Mid-week is where it gets honest. The speed you’re used to is gone, and you can feel the exact shape of what’s missing.

Tasks that were fifteen minutes are an hour. Not because they’re hard, but because you’ve been holding the outline of the solution in a tool’s head instead of your own.

And now you have to hold it yourself again.

And this is the part I don’t love admitting: some of it would be withdrawal, plain and simple. Restless, irritable, reaching for the thing that isn’t there.

If a tool going away makes you feel like that, it stopped being just a tool a while ago. That’s the definition of a habit you didn’t notice forming.

Day seven: the uncomfortable upside

But here’s the twist, and it’s the reason I keep coming back to the experiment. By the end of the week, I think I’d be a slightly better engineer. Slower, grumpier, but better.

You’d start reading source again instead of asking for a summary of it. You’d hold a whole problem in your head because there’s nowhere to offload it.

You’d understand the code you shipped, all of it, because you had no choice but to write every line yourself.

Remember the last post, “Whose name is on it?” For one week, unambiguously, the answer would be yours. Every line, no co-author, no “the AI suggested it and it looked right.”

That’s the real question hiding under the thought experiment. Not “could we cope”. We’d cope.

It’s “how much of what I call my skill is actually mine, and how much is just my ability to ask well?” I genuinely don’t know anymore, and I don’t think I’m alone.

We adopted these tools so fast that we never ran the control experiment. We never worked without them long enough to measure what we kept and what quietly atrophied.

Honestly, let it happen

I’ll be straight about where I’ve landed. I like these tools. I’m faster with them, I ship more, I spend less of my day on the parts of the job I never enjoyed.

Still, I think I’d want the week to happen.

Because lately I can feel parts of my brain going soft. The muscle that used to hold a whole problem in my head without writing anything down.

The one that remembered APIs instead of asking for them. The patience to sit with something confusing long enough to understand it, instead of reaching for a shortcut in the first ten seconds.

Those don’t vanish overnight. They just quietly weaken from disuse, the way any muscle does, until one day you reach for something you used to lift easily and it isn’t there.

A week without the tools wouldn’t be an inconvenience. It’d be the forced trip to the gym I keep not scheduling for myself.

And the fact that I’d need it forced on me, that I can’t seem to choose it on my own, is the clearest sign yet of how hooked I already am.

So maybe I don’t wait for the outage. Maybe I write a little more of my own code by hand this week, while the choice is still mine to make.