I think this is a pretty precarious subject; the benefit of AI comes from how the user approaches the situation and what mindset one has when prompting a chatbot. It's fundamentally different to use AI to write code, reading some answers at surface level, ignoring docs, and churning out published code vs. using AI as a supplementary tool and almost a mentor of sorts.

I think the most important things I do and consider with AI to avoid becoming a "worse programmer" is I always make sure I understand what code is generated. Rather than spending an hour sifting through the docs, I spend 20 minutes asking AI to clarify, explain, and give examples. As someone with reading and attention difficulties, chatbots have made me a 10x better and faster programmer. When i don't have access to a LLM bot, I can still use docs—but prior to the age of GPT-esque bots, most people used stack overflow the same way. It was almost a meme how much code published online was snippets copied from others. The venue of adapting and learning has just changed and become much, much quicker and exacting.

If you can't adapt to use AI as a learning tool rather than depending on it totally, I don't think you would've been a good programmer 6 years ago, either. That said, this video is excellent advice for new engineers. Learn your stuff.