I’m a Senior Dev and I’ve Forgotten How to Think Without a Prompt

Last week, I opened a blank file and froze. Not because I didn’t know how to solve the problem — but because my hands automatically reached for the AI sidebar. Somewhere along the way, “thinking” quietly turned into “prompting”, and I didn’t notice when the switch happened. I’ve been writing code professionally for years. I’ve survived legacy Angular, zoneless migrations, and monorepo chaos. I mentor juniors, I review architecture, I’ve shipped features in codebases where a single bug could cost real money. But today, I catch myself outsourcing not just syntax or boilerplate — I’m outsourcing the actual thinking. Copilot, ChatGPT, even Stack Overflow rewrites: they’re no longer tools I use. They’ve become the place where my thinking starts. And that’s the part that bothers me. This isn’t an “AI is evil” post. It’s a confession from someone who’s supposed to be the adult in the room. How I Slid From “Power User” to Prompt Router The slide didn’t start with anything dramatic. At first, A