Practice Coding Fundamentals in the AI Age

When autocomplete finishes every line, you stop rehearsing the patterns that make code readable at a glance. Six months of heavy AI assistance and the fundamentals start to feel unfamiliar — not gone, but slow. You pause on things that used to be automatic.

Code review takes longer because you're re-learning syntax instead of evaluating logic. Debugging stalls because you can't tell whether the AI produced an idiomatic pattern or a subtle antipattern. Whiteboard interviews expose gaps that didn't exist before you started relying on AI completions.

You don't need to stop using AI tools. You need to practice the fundamentals they're replacing. Spaced repetition resurfaces the syntax you're forgetting before it disappears.