AI is an extremely useful tool. I’m on the other end of the career track, but it seems to be that it’s almost like having a personal tutor. And as with any other teacher, if you use it as an aid to figure things out yourself I imagine it would help immensely, but at the same time if you use it as a crutch to do your work for you, you skills will be as weak as someone who cheats off their friends in school. I attribute a large part of my skills to spending lots of time reading other people’s code and understanding why they wrote it the way they did (usually because some library didn’t do what I wanted so I figured out how to beat it into submission out of pure stubbornness). If you use the AI as an aid and spend the time to really understand the code it’s producing (and the flaws in that code), I think you’ll build up your skills well.

My rant about code monkeys was inspired by people I’ve interviewed and worked with who had to be told exactly how to solve a problem since they apparently had zero problem solving skill themselves. The “programming is just writing code” attitude drives me up the fucking wall and “LLMs are going to make programmers obsolete” is just the latest iteration of that bullshit.