I honestly think the stuff AI is really good at is the stuff around the programming that keeps you from the actual programming.

Take a tool like Gradle. Bigger pain in the ass using an actual cactus as a desk chair. It has a staggering rate of syntax and feature churn with every version upgrade, sprawling documentation that is clearly written by space aliens, every problem is completely ungoogleable as every single release does things differently and no advice stays valid for more than 25 minutes.

It's a comically torturous DevEx. You can literally spend days trying to get your code to compile again, and not a second of that time will be put toward anything productive. Sheer frustration. Just tears. Mad laughter. Rocking back and forth.

"Hey Claude, I've upgraded to this week's Gradle and now I'm getting this error I wasn't getting with last week's version, what could be going wrong?" makes all that go away in 10 minutes.

I'm glad to hear the gradle experience hasn't changed in the decade since I started avoiding it.