I had a software engineering job before AI. I still do, but I can write much more code. I avoid AI in more mission-critical domains and areas where it is more important that I understand the details intimately, but a lot of coding is repetitive busywork, looking for "needles in haystacks", porting libraries, etc. which AI makes 10x easier.
My experience with using AI is that it's a glorified stack overflow copy paster. It'll even glue a handful of SO answers together!
But then you run into classic SO problems... Like the first solution doesn't work. Nor the second one. And the third one introduces a completely different coding style. The last one is implemented in pure sh/GNU utils.
One thing it is absolutely amazing at: digesting things that have bad documentation, like openssl C api. Even then you still gotta be on the watch for hallucinations, and audit it very thoroughly.
