This is very accurate imo - it really is the skill of proper delegation. Same for asking AI questions in an unbiased way so it doesn’t just try to please you - this has made me better at asking questions to people as well!
It’s like a slightly over-eager junior-mid developer, which however doesn’t mind rewriting 30k lines of tests from one framework to another. This means I can let it handle that dirty work, while focusing on the fun and/or challenging parts myself.
I feel like there’s also a meaningful split of software engineers into those who primarily enjoy the process of crafting code itself, and those that primarily enjoy building stuff, treating the code more as a means to an end (even if they enjoy the process of writing code!). The former will likely not have fun with AI, and will likely be increasingly less happy with how all of this evolves over time. The latter I expect are and will mostly be elated.
> It’s like a slightly over-eager junior-mid developer
One with brain damage maybe, I tried out having Claude & Gemini modify a Go program with an absolutely trivial change (change the units displayed in an output type) and it got one of the four lines of code correct (the actual math for the unit conversion) and the rest was incorrect.
In the end, I integrated the helper function it output myself.
SOTA models can generate two or three lines of code accurately at a time and you have to describe them with such specificity that I've usually already done the hard part of the thinking by the time I have a specific enough prompt, that it's easier to just type out the code.
At best they save me looking up a unit conversion formula, which makes them about as useful as a search engine
That sounds very unlike my experience. I frequently get it to modify / create large parts of files at a time, successfully.