the ship has sailed on my handcoding at work. the AI is producing stuff thats more bulletproof than what I can do in the same timeframe and if my competitors are using it, the pressure to ship is that much higher.
Personally, I've taken the time its freed up to spend more time on mathacademy and reading more theory oriented books on data structures and algorithms. AI coding systems are at their best when paired with someone with broad knowledge. knowing what to ask for and knowing the vocabulary to be specific about what you want to be built is going to be a much more valuable job skill going forward.
One example is a small AI based learning system I have been developing in my free time to help me learn. the mvp stored an entire knowledge graph and progress in markdown files. being an engineer, I knew this wouldn't scale so once I proved the concept viable, I moved everything into sqlite with a graphdb. then I decided to wrap some parts of teh functionality in to rust and put everything behind a small rust layer with the progress tracking logic still being in python.
someone with no knowlege of graph databases or dependncy graphs or heuristics would not be able to build this even if they had AI. they simply don't know what they dont' know and AI wont' save you there.
That said, I think its important to also spend time in the dirt. I've recently started pickign up zig as my NO AI langauge just to keep. those skills sharp.
I've been relying primarily on deepseek-v4-flash for 90% of my work. It sips tokens. that model will run on 128gb. not a cheap configuration for a consumer but within the budget of a developer relying on it for work.
Ive only been using kimi 2.5 and deepseek pro for reviewing PRs for security issues. less than 10% of my workflow requires a full powered frontier model.
I think the issue is overblown by people who think claude code is a good harness and use opus for everything. opencode is objectively better. its much more verbose about what its doing, you have more control when it comes to offloading to subagents with targeted context (crucial for running through larger jobs) and I can swap between codex and open weight models.
However everything in this field is cargo culting. We have absolutely no way to quantify productivity in the real world.
We've had advanced programming languages backed by advanced programming language theory for decades and the most used/ran programming languages in the world are C, PHP and JavaScript, languages held together by duct tape or in the case of C, programing language theory from the 60s.
We have a super minimal JavaScript runtime in the browser to avoid a bloated standard library and then people invent things like leftpad. At the same time basically every major website in the world serves mega bytes of tracking and ad serving libraries.
We all "know" AI makes coders more productive but nobody can do the equivalent of a clinical trial for a major new drug.
Personally, I've taken the time its freed up to spend more time on mathacademy and reading more theory oriented books on data structures and algorithms. AI coding systems are at their best when paired with someone with broad knowledge. knowing what to ask for and knowing the vocabulary to be specific about what you want to be built is going to be a much more valuable job skill going forward.
One example is a small AI based learning system I have been developing in my free time to help me learn. the mvp stored an entire knowledge graph and progress in markdown files. being an engineer, I knew this wouldn't scale so once I proved the concept viable, I moved everything into sqlite with a graphdb. then I decided to wrap some parts of teh functionality in to rust and put everything behind a small rust layer with the progress tracking logic still being in python.
someone with no knowlege of graph databases or dependncy graphs or heuristics would not be able to build this even if they had AI. they simply don't know what they dont' know and AI wont' save you there.
That said, I think its important to also spend time in the dirt. I've recently started pickign up zig as my NO AI langauge just to keep. those skills sharp.