I'm also an (amateur) writer and a (mostly past) developer.

I've recently created multiple software projects without writing a line of code, and I love it -- maybe that's because I've worked as a product manager for years: I'm already abstracted from the direct code. I still write code for fun (project euler, advent of code, learning new languages) but I can't imagine the slowness of creating a whole thing from scratch.

I've recently created a hard-science fiction novella. I used AI significantly for research and scientific review, but I wrote every word. I tried having the LLM write it, and the result was awful. Maybe someday (soon?) that will improve, but for now I have to do it the old-fashioned way.

I enjoy both coding and writing directly. But I can easily see a time when it's like jogging, or biking, or going to the gym, rather than being a hunter-gatherer or a factory worker -- a pleasant thing to do, with beneficial effects, but not something done to a specific end.

I am very similar. I am a software engineer, trying to make the transition to full time writer. A year ago, I "finished" a first draft of my novel and I used AI to write some of the prose so I could get to that completed draft.

Now I've finished the third draft, and I think I've finally eradicated all of that slop from the text. It was terrible writing. Prose is my strength, it's what I was best at, why would I pass that off to a clanker, when it's the thing I was born to do in this world?

There are lots of other ways AI is helping me write, though:

- Hard Sci-fi - it creates simulations of various spacecraft configurations and allows to me see how it would play out. - Research - Consistency Checking - Simulated Reviews from different perspectives. Not as good as human reviewers, but still very useful. - Notes organizations - Speculation tracking and canon differentiateion

I will never use AI to write prose again. Even if it got really good, the point isn't the prose. The point is that I have something to say, and I'm going to use my own words to say it. If an LLM wrote this prose, even if it was at the level of winning a major literary prize, it still wouldn't be the words I would write, and it isn't satisfying.