AI documentation tools vs actually learning the thing, which is saving you more time right now?

Been a PT by day, tinkering with code and AI tools by night for a while now. Writing dev tutorials as a side thing. And I keep running into this split where AI tools either make me faster or make me lazier in a way I regret later. Specifically with documentation and code explanation tools. Cursor, Copilot, the Claude API, whatever. They can explain a codebase to you in 30 seconds. But there's a real cost when you skip the part where you actually understand what you built. The flip side is time is finite. I'm not a full time dev. I need to ship something that works and move on. Using AI to fill gaps is just practical. What I keep coming back to is this: are these tools actually accelerating skill development, or just making it possible to fake competence long enough to finish a project? For professional devs this probably matters differently than it does for people building side projects with limited hours. Curious where people land on this. Not in a philosophical way, more practically. Has your actual skill level gone up since you started leaning on these tools, or are you more dependent now than you were a year ago? submitted by /u/RareSprinkles9387 [link] [留言]