What you said about "we're all cooked" and "AI is useless" is literally me and everyone I know switching between the two on an hourly basis...

I find it the most exciting time for me as a builder, I can just get more things done.

Professionally, I'm dreading for our future, but I'm sure it will be better than I fear, worse than I hope.

From a toolset, I use the usual, Cursor (Super expensive if you go with Opus 4.6 max, but their computer use is game changing, although soon will become a commodity), Claude code (pro max plan) - is my new favorite. Trying out codex, and even copilot as it's practically free if you have enterprise GitHub. I'm going to probably move to Claude Code, I'm paying way too much for Cursor, and I don't really need tab completion anymore... once Claude Code will have a decent computer use environment, I'll probably cancel my Cursor account. Or... I'll just use my own with OpenClaw, but I'm not going to give it any work / personal access, only access to stuff that is publicly available (e.g. run sanity as a regular user). Playing with skills, subagents, agent teams, etc... it's all just markdowns and json files all the way down...

About our professional future:

I'm not going to start learning to be a plumber / electrician / A/C repair etc, and I am not going to recommend my children to do so either, but I am not sure I will push them to learn Computer Science, unless they really want to do Computer Science.

What excites me the most right now is my experiments with OpenClaw / NanoClaw, I'm just having a blast.

tl;dr most exciting yet terrifying times of my life.

I've gone back and forth on it a lot myself, but lately I've been more optimistic, for a couple of reasons.

While the final impact LLMs will have is yet to be determined (the hype cycle has to calm down, we need time to see impacts in production software, and there is inevitably going to be some kind of collapse in the market at some point), its undoubtable that it will improve overall productivity (though I think it's going to be far more nuanced then most people think). But with that productivity improvement will come a substantial increase in complexity and demand for work. We see this playout every single time some tool comes along and makes engineers in any field more productive. Those changes will also take time, but I suspect we're going to see a larger number of smaller teams working on more projects.

And ultimately, this change is coming for basically all industries. The only industries that might remain totally unaffected are ones that rely entirely on manual labor, but even then the actual business side of the business will also be impacted. At the end of the day I think it's better to be in a position to understand and (even to a small degree) influence the way things are going, instead of just being along for the ride.

If the only value someone brings is the ability to take a spec from someone else and churn out a module/component/class/whatever, they should be very very worried right now. But that doesn't describe a single software engineer I know.