Comment by webprofusion

I think currently once you get into the weeds of a project the AI can only really lend a helping hand, rather than do 30-50% of the work.

It can kickstart new projects to get over the blank page syndrome but after that there's still work, either prompting or fixing it yourself.

There are requirements-led approaches where you can try to stay in prompt mode as much as possible (like feeding spec to a junior dev) but there is a point where you just have to do things yourself.

Software development has never been about lines of code, it has always required a lot of back and forth discussion, decisions, digging into company/domain lore to get the background on stuff.

Reviewing AI code, and lots of it, is hard work - it can get stuff wrong when you least expect it ("I'll just stub out this authentication so it returns true and our test passes")

With all that in mind though, as someone who would pay other devs to do work I would be horrified if someone spent a week writing unit tests that I can clearly see an AI would generate in 30 seconds. There are some task that just make sense for AI to do now.