Muscle memory is our brain’s way of making repeated actions effortless.
Actions we repeat often become part of our muscle memory, reducing the effort our brain needs to perform them. When we practice typing, our brain and muscles optimize the movements until it becomes effortless. If we stop doing that regularly, our muscle memory fades.
Now in today’s world, where we use Copilots in IDEs a lot, our muscle memory for coding is fading away quickly. I have experienced this myself in recent days as I have become dependent on Copilot. Copilot makes coding feel easier because we don’t always recall code from memory, we simply recognize its suggestions and approve them. But recognition doesn’t build muscle memory the same way recall does. Muscle memory only improves when our brain does the hard work of recalling things until they become ingrained.
When we already have expertise in something, Copilot can be helpful since our muscle memory is strong and does not fade quickly. But when we are learning something new, Copilot can be dangerous.
I have experienced this lately and have disabled Copilot while I am learning something new or working on complex tasks I am not yet comfortable with.
AI makes us faster but we have the risk of losing the very muscle memory that makes us skilled!