---
title: "Programming with AI is like an electric bicycle: fast and fun, and it makes you lazy if you ride it too often"
language: en
topics: ["AI", "experiment", "lifestyle", "programming", "work", "writing"]
full_article_url: https://willem.com/en/2026-03-18_the-electric-bicycle/
---
# Programming with AI is like an electric bicycle: fast and fun, and it makes you lazy if you ride it too often

*Use the assist on the headwind stretches, keep the legs your own.*

> On 18 March 2026, after a month of building with agents and three self-running websites live, I wrote that programming with AI is like an electric bicycle. This is what I mean, and how I keep the muscle.

Everything a model writes is an echo of what it has seen, never a hundred percent reproduction. For most work that is fine, because most work does not need the last twenty percent. If you operate in that last twenty percent, the added value is limited: the model is good at commonplace.
That month I also hit the ceiling: a monolithic AI project starts making mistakes that are dumb, the output is voluminous but not better, fast but not precise. Decay by AI is a real risk nobody talks about.
So I ride the bicycle where it helps, on the abstraction layers an agent can make redundant, and switch it off on the flat. Read everything before it ships, keep the model of the system in your own head, make the difficult parts simpler instead of prompting around them.