After months of heavy AI-assisted coding, how do I keep my programming skills sharp?

A useful split is to let AI handle predictable boilerplate such as DTOs, routine controllers, or repetitive scripts, while you personally implement unfamiliar or important logic. Ask the assistant to explain possible approaches, then write the key parts yourself. The benefit is that you spend less time on drudgery without giving up understanding.

This is becoming a broader engineering issue: AI can help teams deliver quickly, but it can also hide technical debt and leave developers unable to evaluate what was produced. Treat generated code like a contribution from another engineer. Review it carefully, test it, trace the design, and require yourself to understand the pieces that matter before shipping them.

The straightforward answer is to deliberately practice the skills you want to keep. If you stop writing code, debugging, and solving problems yourself, those abilities will get rusty. Keep using AI for repetitive work, but regularly solve small problems without it and make sure you can explain the important parts of your production code.

Some loss of fluency is normal, especially for details you rarely use. The important distinction is whether you can still reason about the system, recognize bad solutions, and work through a problem from first principles. Set aside regular no-AI sessions for interview-style exercises, debugging, or building a small feature from scratch. That will reveal and repair the gaps much faster than simply reading generated code.