The Quiet Reversal A pattern keeps surfacing in Hacker News threads, Lobsters comments, and dev Mastodon: experienced developers turning Copilot off. Not for a podcast take, not as a Luddite stunt — for the work that actually requires understanding. The k10s.dev post that lit up HN this month was the latest, but it joins a year of similar reversals from people who use these tools daily and ship code for a living. The framing matters. This isn't "AI bad." It's "I noticed I got worse at my job, and I want to figure out why." What the measurements actually show The Model Evaluation and Threat Research group ran a randomized trial in July 2025 with 16 experienced open-source maintainers working on their own repositories. They sampled 246 real tasks and let the developers use Cursor Pro with frontier models on half of them. Before starting, the developers predicted AI would make them 24% faster. After finishing, they self-reported being 20% faster.…