It’s a thin line to walk for me, but I feel that the whole “skill atrophy” aspect of it is the hardest to not slip into. What I’ve personally liked about these tools is that they give me ample room to explore and experiment with different approaches to a particular problem because then translating a valid one into “the official implementation” is very easy.

I’m a guy who likes to DO to validate assumptions: if there’s some task about how something should be written concurrently to be efficient and then we need some post processing to combine the results, etc, etc, well, before Claude Code, I’d write a scrappy prototype (think like a single MVC “slice” of all the distinct layers but all in a single Java file) to experiment, validate assumptions and uncover the unknown unknowns.

It’s how I approach programming and always will. I think writing a spec as an issue or ticket about something without getting your hands dirty will always be incomplete and at odds with reality. So I write, prototype and build.

With a “validated experiment” I’d still need a lot of cleaning up and post processing in a way to make it production ready. Now it’s a prompt! The learning is still the process of figuring things out and validating assumptions. But the “translation to formal code” part is basically solved.

Obviously, it’s also a great unblocking mechanism when I’m stuck on something be it a complex query or me FEELING an abstraction is wrong but not seeing a good one etc.