Let's put it this way, I don't think AI will take my job/career away until company owners are also prepared to also let it handle being on-call. I still very accountable for the code produced.

I basically have two modes

1. "Snipe mode"

I need to solve problem X, here I fire up my IDE, start codex up and begin prompting to find the bug fix. Most of the time I have enough domain context about the code that once it's found and fixed the issue it's trivial for to reconcile that it's good code and I am shipping it. I can be sniping several targets at anyone time.

Most of my day-to-day work is in snipe mode.

2. "Feature mode"

This is where I get agents to build features/apps, I've not used this mode in anger for anything other than toy/side projects and I would not be happy about the long term prospects of maintaining anything I've produced.

It's stupidly stupidly fun/addictive and yes satisfying! :)

I rebuilt a game that I used to play when I was 11 and still had a small community of people actively wanting to play it, entirely by vibe coding, it works, it's live and honestly I've had some of the most rewarding feedback from making that I've had in my career from complete strangers!

I've also built numerous tools for myself and my kids that I'd never of had time to build before, and I now can. Again the level of reward for building apps etc that my kids ( and their friends ) are using, is very different from anything I've been career wise.

I'm currently testing Claude Code for a project where it isn't coding. But the workflows built with it are now making me money after ~2 weeks, and I've previously done the same work manually, so I know the turnaround time: The turnaround for each deliverable is ~2 days with Claude and the fastest I've ever done it manually was 21 days. (Yes, I'm being intentionally vague - there isn't much of a moat for that project given how close Claude gets with very little prompting)

There are absolutely maintainability challenges. You can't just tell these tools to build X and expect to get away with not reviewing the output and/or telling it to revise it.

But if you loosen the reigns and review finished output rather than sit there and metaphorically look over its shoulder for every edit, the time it takes me to get it to revise its work until the quality is what I'd expect of myself is still a tiny fraction of what it'd take me to do things manually.

The time estimate above includes my manual time spent on reviews and fixes. I expect that time savings to increase, as about half of the time I spend on this project now is time spent improving guardrails and adding agents etc. to refine the work automatically before I even glance at the output.

The biggest lesson for me is that when people are not getting good results, most of the time it seems to me it is when people keep watching every step their agent takes, instead of putting in place a decent agent loop (create a plan for X; for each item on the plan: run tests until it works, review your code and fix any identified issues, repeat until the tests and review pass without any issues) and letting the agent work until it stops before you waste time reviewing the result.

Only when the agent repeatedly fails to do an assigned task adequately do I "slow it down" and have it do things step by step to figure out where it gets stuck / goes wrong. At which point I tell it to revise the agents accordingly, and then have it try again.

It's not cost effective to have expensive humans babysit cheap LLMs, yet a lot of people seem to want to babysit the LLMs.