Comment by TheCapeGreek

I've been able to execute several highly niche, large scale refactors in a production system in the last 6 months, entirely enabled by AI tooling. The kinds of changes that individually by hand would have taken months and you would never get top down approval to do because it would take paid developer time away from client-focused work.

This has stabilised the system, fleshed out unfinished ideas, expanded testing capability, introduced new developer-experience oriented tools, and refactored sensitive systems to be more flexible for future use. Not to mention addressing the kinds of uber-niche tech debt that would take years to bite and months to fix.

It's far from fantasy.