I've actually slowed down my AI usage these days. I'm more active working in software and I feel it just frustrates and slows me down. Plus, if I use AI I feel like I'm not learning anything new. A great quote I once heard said, "The problem with machine learning is that it's the machine that does the learning". I'm back to hand coding 99% of stuff and I feel I'm much faster and knowledgeable now.

The sad realization I had recently is if most people are having the AI doing everything for them they're easily replaceable because the next guy can have the AI do everything for them too. The ones who are going to stick around are the ones who develop deep expertise in stuff the AI can't do that well, which is just about anything when you get past the surface level stuff.

Most developers already lack the knowledge of how to build projects without an IDE or to how to build third party software from scratch. This was the case before AI came around. Now, with AI, they have even less incentive to learn the deep inner-workings of the software they build so they're handicapping themselves further.

IDE dependent engineers are just tool experts in my opinion. They're really good at using their IDE but they're not experts at whatever language they're working in. They're also not experts at engineering. Engineering is having a specific set of skills (Liam Neeson told me this) that transfer to any language and problem set.

I feel like their chances of developing these skill are even less now with AI. Which makes them easily swappable with another "tool expert". This is the wet dream of upper management.