A Developer Confessed They're Scared of Their Own AI-Written Code

A developer recently confessed something uncomfortable on Reddit: they're scared of their own code. Not scared of breaking production. Not scared of a bad deploy. Scared because they don't actually understand the code they wrote — or rather, the code their AI wrote for them. The Quarantine Experiment The confession came from a post on r/ExperiencedDevs that racked up hundreds of comments. The developer described putting themselves through a self-imposed "AI quarantine" — no Copilot, no ChatGPT, no Claude, nothing. Pure manual coding for two weeks. What they discovered shook them. Tasks that should've taken an hour took four. Code patterns they'd been shipping for months suddenly looked foreign. They described the feeling as being "a tourist in their own codebase." You've Probably Felt This Too If you've used AI coding tools heavily for more than six months, try this: close your AI assistant, open a blank file, and write a function you've implemented dozens of times. A debounce. A binar