AI gives you either free expertise or free time. If you can make software above the level of Gemini or Claude output, then have it write your local tools, or have it write synthetic data for tests, or have it optimize your zshrc or bash profile. Maybe have it implement changes your skip level wants to see made, which you know they are amateurish, unsound garbage with revolting UI. Rather than waste your day writing ill-advised but high quality code just to show them how it’s a bad idea, you can have AI write code for you, to illustrate your point without spending any real work hours on it.

Just in my office, I have seen “small tools” like Charles Proxy almost entirely disappear. Everyone writes/shares their AI-generated solutions now rather than asking cyber to approve a 3rd party envfile values autoloader to be whitelisted across the entire organization.

senior as well, few years from finishing up my career. I run 8 to 12 terminals entire day. it is changing existing and writing new stuff all day, every day. 100’s of thosands of lines of changed/added/removed code in production… and a lot less issues than when every line was typed in by me (or another human)

What sort of work do you do? I suspect a lot of the differences of opinion here are caused by these systems being a lot better at some kinds of programming than others.

I do lower level operating systems work. My bread and butter is bit-packing shenanigans, atomics, large-scale system performance, occasionally assembly language. It’s pretty bad at those things. It comes up with code that looks like what you’d expect, but doesn’t actually work.

It’s good for searching code big codebases. “I’m crashing over here because this pointer has the low bit set, what would do that?” It’s not consistent, but it’s easy to check what it finds and it saves time overall. It can be good for making tests, especially when given an example to work from. And it’s really good for helper scripts. But so far, production code is a no-go for me.