Has AI Made You A Lazier Developer? Be Honest.

Haven't you ever wondered if this AI vibe coding has made us lazy? Who's been solving problems on LeetCode lately? 😅 I've noticed that accepting is easier than thinking, by a margin so small that no single accept feels like anything, and it adds up anyway. Part of why it's hard to notice is that it feels faster even when it isn't. But I've come to think "lazy" is the right worry aimed at the wrong thing. There are two kinds of lazy and only one of them is a problem. I'm going to go into a little background here, because I didn't come up with this, and I didn't reach this conclusion on my own. Lazy is why we have compilers Larry Wall, who created Perl, put laziness first on his list of the three great virtues of a programmer , and his definition is the whole argument: "the quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure." Great effort. Good lazy isn't the absence of work, it's work moved somewhere better, and it's more or less why compilers exist (somebody got tired of writing the same assembly by hand and decided, reasonably, that the machine could do that part) and why every abstraction we lean on all day is really someone's laziness done properly. Handing that kind of toil to a model is nothing new. The config I've written a hundred times and the regex I could write but would rather not and the Dockerfile I could recite and the test scaffolding that comes out identical in every project I've ever started: I understand all of it and I'm simply declining to type it again and I feel no guilt about that whatsoever (honestly I'd be more worried about a developer who insisted on typing all of it out by hand in 2026, on principle, one character at a time, while the rest of the team went home). That's not skipping the thinking. That's skipping the typing after the thinking was already done. The other kind skips the understanding The second kind of lazy offloads the understanding itself. The model writes the thing and it runs and the tests are