AI produces code that often looks really good, at a pace quicker than you can read it.

It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag of ** and it's leading you down the garden path. I've been a dev for 20 years (which isn't to imply I'm any good at it yet) and it's not uncommon I'll find myself leaning on the AI a bit too hard and then you realise you've lost a day to a pattern that wasn't right, or an API it hallucinated, in the first place.

It basically feels like I'm being gaslit constantly, even though I've changed my tools to some that feel like they work better with AIs. I expect it's difficult for junior devs to cope with that and keep up with senior devs, who normally would have offloaded tasks to them instead of AI.

One thing about AI that I did not anticipate is how useful it is for refactoring though. Like if I have walked down (with the help of an AI or not) a bad path, I can refactor the entire codebase to use a better strategy in much less time than before because refactoring is uniquely suited to AI - if you provide the framework, the design, the abstractions, AI can rewrite a bunch of code to use that new design. I'm frankly not sure if its faster than doing a refactor by hand, but its certainly less boring.

If you have good tests and a good sense for design and you know how to constrain and direct the AI, you can avoid a lot of boring work. That is something.