A confession to open with: ask me to draw a circle by hand and you'll get something resembling a potato having an identity crisis. Give me Photoshop and I'll draw perfect ones all day, which makes me handy with a tool, not an artist. AI in coding works exactly the same way. For a strong developer it's rocket fuel; for everyone else it cheerfully generates problems you won't notice. The string concatenation in a hot loop that's hundreds of times slower, sitting quietly in server-side code called by thousands of clients. It works. That's the dangerous part. This talk is about staying the artist rather than just the person holding the brush: where AI accelerates good engineering, where it lovingly amplifies your worst habits, and why senior judgement matters more in the AI era, not less.