I Banned Myself from AI for 5 Days. My Productivity Didn't Crash — Something Else Did.

I read a headline last month: "Developers Think AI Makes Them 24% Faster. The Data Says 19% Slower." I closed the tab. Opened it again. Read it three times. I've been using Copilot and Claude every day for over a year. I genuinely could not tell you where my thinking ends and the autocomplete begins anymore. That scared me more than the statistic did. So I did something dramatic: I banned myself from all of it for five days. No Copilot. No Claude. No ChatGPT. Nothing. Just me, the official docs, Stack Overflow, and whatever I could remember from actually learning things. Here's what happened. Day 1: Slower. But Weirdly Calm. I'm working on a FastAPI backend — authentication flow, JWT refresh tokens, the usual. Normally I'd type a comment like # generate a JWT with 24h expiry and return it and watch Copilot draft the function. Instead, I opened the PyJWT docs like it was 2019. It took me three times as long to write the same function. But something strange happened: I wasn't anxious. Us