I Let AI Write Half My Code for a Month: What Happened

Thirty days. That’s how long I committed to using GitHub Copilot for every single coding task. No cherry-picking easy wins, no turning it off when things got complicated. I wanted to know: is this actually useful, or just glorified autocomplete?

The short answer? Both. And neither.

Week one was rough. Copilot suggested code that looked right but wasn’t. It confidently hallucinated API methods that don’t exist. Twice it tried to import libraries I’ve never heard of—because they literally don’t exist. I spent more time fact-checking the AI than I would’ve spent just writing the damn code myself.

But then something shifted around day eight. I stopped expecting magic and started treating it like a junior developer. Not incompetent, just… inexperienced. You wouldn’t take a junior’s first draft as gospel, right? Same principle.

The breakthrough moment: I was refactoring a gnarly authentication module, and Copilot suggested a pattern I’d never considered. It was weird. It used a decorator chain that seemed overcomplicated. But I tested it, and holy hell, it actually solved an edge case I hadn’t even thought about yet.

Here’s what surprised me most: the real value wasn’t code generation. It was speed on the boring stuff. Boilerplate? Gone. Test scaffolding? Instant. That repetitive CRUD endpoint you’ve written 50 times? Yeah, the AI handles it while you grab coffee.

My teammate Sarah started using it too. She’s been coding for 15 years and was skeptical. Last week she told me she’s 30% faster on feature work. Not because AI writes better code—it doesn’t—but because she’s spending zero brain cycles on the mindless parts.

The dark side? We caught three security vulnerabilities in AI-suggested code during code review. SQL injection risks, hardcoded credentials in examples, an XSS hole you could drive a truck through. If you’re not reviewing AI code with the same scrutiny as human code, you’re playing with fire.

Bottom line: AI coding assistants are legit productivity boosters, but only if you know enough to question their output. It’s a power tool, not a replacement for knowing your craft.