I'm sort of in the same boat but I'm finding every day more and more people I trust gleefully use these tools. I still don't really get it. I get suggestions of things I should try, techniques I should try, how to prompt, how to harness, which models to use. I just find the output off and end up going in and just going over the work again.

The conclusion I've come to is that good taste has been replaced with "works; good enough". Maybe that's the end state. Maybe the end is just a bland mass of tangled code that's junky but it works. Speed over quality has always been a currency in this industry and maybe this is just the purest expression of it.

But at the end, it leaves me with my preferences and tastes and what I think is right and I feel more and more isolated. I don't think the people who are happily using AI tools are incompetent. I know they're not. I think they just are a little more in tune with how the winds are changing.

In the long run, I'm not sure how this ends. Programming is a lifelong pursuit of endless learning. When you use tools like this, your learning becomes stunted. But maybe I'm wrong. Nobody knows.