The people who go through phases are also born to be something for life: adaptable, and used to change. Being good at doing exactly one thing your entire life a certain way has the potentially fatal flaw of having significant issue doing anything else.

I feel like I've lived 3-4 completely different lives so far, but the constant is the ability to adapt to the next one, and still find joy in it while you're there. "Survival is the ability to swim in strange water."

Personally, the AI tools have been transformative for work, but haven't affected how I work much. I have always coded as a team. I'd often do the largest and most complicated parts myself, but work (both at work work and my hobby work) has always been about passing things between colleagues based on what our strengths were and how much time we had.

The AI tools are another colleague. They work incredibly fast, and I do less coding myself now, but my goal was always to solve the problem, not the code itself. The AI tools do a great job most of the time, but they sometimes screw up and need more guidance or me to step in to fix the thing (usually a very small error compared to the whole). If they screw it all up, we might need to start from scratch, or I might need to just do it myself. But that's not most of the time. And then I figure out the thing missing in my process to move them in the right direction, and improve it.

I feel like any software developer used to collaborating with, training, and mentoring other developers knows exactly how to work with AI tools, and the only main difference is how much effort I put into being really nice about it the whole time.

One main thing has changed. Before I would handle the most complicated problems people were having trouble with myself. Now I allow AI to work on them, even if I know I'll have to fix it. The difference is that I care about the time, the strain, and the morale of my coworkers. AI is just getting paid for iterating tokens, so I don't have to feel bad about what I ask it to figure out for me.