I'm a data analyst and a bit of a data engineer,which comes with the territory. I maintain some unholy pipelines that I wrote a few years back and they were due for refactoring for a long time. I do the AI-fueled refactoring in the most basic way - paste the code, ask for suggestions, implement the ones that are sensible, ask for clarifications whenever something's new to me. The last part is absolute gold. I've learned so much with the help of AI that I think the more I use it the less I need it, rinse and repeat.

I'm at the other spectrum of what the author feels. I feel smarter and more capable with AI, and I'm actually surprised how helpful it is in my workflow. I still write code by hand but I know way more than I would without it.

Granted, I'm the "accidental programmer in a team that's completely non technical" and AI is simply a senior I'd never have otherwise. YMMV but I think if you use the tool as a more expressive Google search it can be a great companion.

Pure vibe coding is not far from "let's outsource everything", it's just a bit cheaper and more available.

> YMMV but I think if you use the tool as a more expressive Google search it can be a great companion.

I get the most mileage out of this as well. It's the middle ground option. Everyone's either saying AI is useless, or saying how it's so good that writing code is an obsolete task already. Personally, I'm learning a ton with AI as a research tool, and implementing my code by hand with that knowledge. It also naturally solves the "you can't review 20,000 lines of code a day to even properly understand that it's correct" problem as a side effect too. But I am still building things much faster.