> One thing I've noticed is, that coding manually is exponentially more stressful than the slow AI approach.

I find the exact opposite. Typically the AI will make too many mistakes (even with latest advanced models), they usually aren't major/program breaking mistakes, but they still require fixing if I want to keep the code quality good enough, and make future changes possible without a falling house of cards. In order to describe the correct approach I have to write more English to describe the problem than the amount of code I could write myself. I could maybe see it working by writing rough pseudo code and having the AI translate, but then I loose out on any code analysis or tab completion as I write. It's also just innately frustrating to have to babysit and correct somethings work all the time. This all may be in part caused by the nature of my current work for the last couple years, which has mostly been on library code rather than application code.

I suspect I'd have a very different experience if I was working on CRUD related tasks like making new API endpoints, interfacing with a DB, or writing FE components. Not to make light of those tasks, I enjoy that work, though it is much more repetitive.

I agree with the parts about using AI to ask questions and gain better understanding though. I do that constantly for APIs and languages that I don't have a clear mental model of. It's like an interactive search.

Also agree on POCs, sometimes there are small tools, demos, or prototype features that I don't need to care deeply about.

If I'm working on a non-coercive environment (No deadlines, requirements, etc..) hand coding in hyper-focus mode is extremely zen. But working on a deadline it really hurts. My brain can't help but ratchet up the stress.