I do genuinely wonder if you’re correct that other people will begin to expect it. I feel I was suddenly able to do stunning stuff about a year ago, and I recall thinking this is nice but everyone will catch on to my secret soon and I won’t be exceptional any more. But 12 months have passed and I don’t think this has really panned out yet. Weaker engineers just don’t seem to understand that they can just ask AI things. Eg the other day another engineer spent like 3 hours trying to hunt down a particular line of code so I asked AI and it found it in like 5 minutes. I showed that to him, but then he immediately got stuck trying to find something else for a few more hours, so again I asked AI etc. It’s very baffling.

There is definitely a learning threshold and it's still early days. Not every developer has found out how to make efficient use of these tools yet. But I think most will, soon enough.

But I think my own clients will soon start to question why some feature takes ME a week, when I was able to deliver another feature in a day or two.

That they are features that used to take months, and even delivering them in a week is a goddamn miracle by 2025 standards, will not be relevant. They won't expect such features to take months any longer, based on what I've delivered earlier this year.

So I think that the past few and maybe next few months, maybe a year, will be remembered as a "happy hour" for this tech as a developer. These are the days that we'll talk about saying "those were the days". :)

I am still optimistic that "the normal" in a few years will be pretty much like it has been before - I'll be delivering features at work and tinkering with hobby projects at home, and the major difference will be a much larger scope and ambition for both.

Direct use of AI is going to be a filter on a lot of people - some permanently I suspect (especially say older people). But perhaps this will be short lived as the interfaces to AI are improved enough that everyone will benefit.