"Addiction" is a strong word for what's usually just a workflow that crept up on you. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to stop understanding their own code — it happens one convenient shortcut at a time, over months, until the shortcuts are the whole job. Here's how to tell where you actually are, not where you assume you are.

Go through these. Being honest costs nothing — nobody's grading this. Prefer a shorter, more personal take? Start with Am I Addicted to AI Coding?.

1. You read less of the code than you used to. Not zero — you still skim. But "skim" has quietly become your only setting, even for code going into production.

2. Your first move on a bug is to paste the error, not read it. Signs you can't code without AI usually start here: the stack trace becomes something you copy, not something you parse.

3. You've asked AI to explain code that AI itself wrote. This one's specific and it's a strong signal. If this has happened more than once, that's worth sitting with.

4. A tool outage derails your whole day, not just slows it down. Mild annoyance is normal. If Claude or Copilot being down for an afternoon makes you feel genuinely stuck — that's a dependency symptom, not a productivity complaint.

5. You can't sketch your own architecture without opening the code. Try it right now, actually — on paper, no peeking. If you can't explain why your auth logic lives where it does, that's a real gap, not a trick question.

6. You accept multi-file changes without reading the diff. Agentic tools make this easy to do by default. Easy doesn't mean safe.

7. "Make it work" is a complete prompt for you. No spec, no plan, no constraints — just vibes and a retry loop. If that's your normal mode for anything beyond a throwaway script, that's a sign you're relying on iteration instead of understanding.

8. You couldn't onboard someone onto your own codebase without AI's help. A rough test: could you explain your last project to a new hire from memory? If the honest answer involves "I'd have to ask Claude first" — note that.

9. You don't remember the last time you wrote a function completely unaided. Not "wrote from a blank file with no autocomplete ever" — just: can you place it in time? If you can't, it's probably been a while.

10. You verify less than you used to, not more. Ironically, AI-generated code needs more scrutiny than hand-written code, not less — you didn't build the mental model as you went. If your review habits haven't adjusted for that, that's a gap between how much you trust the code and how much you've actually checked it.

11. You're specifically worried about ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot dependency and searched this to find out. Not a joke — if "am I too dependent on ChatGPT" is the actual sentence you typed to get here, that's already a data point. People who aren't dependent don't usually go looking for the checklist. For tool-specific practice, see Coding Without ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot.

12. You feel a flicker of something reading this list. Not guilt necessarily — just recognition. That flicker is usually accurate. Bodies and brains tend to know before the conscious mind catches up.

How many did you check?

  • 0–3: Healthy relationship with AI tools. You're using a good calculator, not losing arithmetic.
  • 4–7: Worth paying attention to, not panicking about. Small, deliberate changes now are cheap. Waiting makes them more expensive.
  • 8–12: This is the range where "signs of dependency" stops being a hypothetical and starts being a description. Also the most common range, so — not alone here.

This list is a gut-check, not a diagnosis. If you want an actual number instead of a self-scored list, the full test breaks this down across seven categories (AI usage, code ownership, debugging, verification, and more) with 25 questions instead of 12 checkboxes.

Take the full test →

If a chunk of this landed, the next useful thing to read isn't more symptoms — it's How to Quit Vibe Coding, which is the actual step-by-step version of "okay, now what."

→ Narrative take: Am I Addicted to AI Coding?

→ By tool: Coding Without ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot

→ Next step: How to Quit Vibe Coding