No, but it helps design. How big of a box. What vegetables thrive together. What ones should be kept apart. What spacing. How much root depth. Can ground hogs get at it. Here look at this picture. Looks like a tomator disease, what do you think?

Programming equates to architecture. It equates to system design. You can have good (non-sycophantic) conversations about what, why, push back when it's wrong, agree when it's right.

And if it's for a personal project, then for some people the labor and the learning is the value. For others maybe it's showing the end product to their 6year old that dreamt of a game where a dolphin was flying in space with ninjas trying to attack it.

That's why was was careful to say engineers of equal skill with and without. I think you hate read and ignored that part. I did not say jreng+claude code is now a principal architect..

Hard disagree. Random utility scripts, most, terraform, and ansible, brainstorming architecture decisions, throwing an error log at it and spitting back the plausible solution. All faster. But the engineer needs to be capable of knowing when it's plausible or not.

I don't think replacing sr engs with interns+claude is the solution. But many sr+principal engineers can be accelerated on a majority of tasks. That's why was careful to say equally skilled engineer with/without.

Yes. I agree those are all terrible. And I agree with your assessment of almost all of them. But I'm not naive enough to think that we can put the evils back in and switch back to a non-ai world. We live, we grow, we adapt. This is the future, no matter how bleak it is.

I didn't say it improves quality of life. I said it can lower barriers of entry to some things, and it can improve a workers productivity when you compare two workers of equal skill.

"AI gives me nothing I can't find for myself." True, but that's the point.

From a worker standpoint, while you're researching that thing you can find for yourself, someone of equal skill to you that is leveraging AI has solved 3 of those issues. And someone with more skill has solved 10. And someone with lesser has either crashed the network, or solved that same 1.

From a personal use standpoint: is the value of creation in the journey and the learning? For some it is. For others it being able to remove barriers and obstacles to create a new website you've been wanting to, or planning out a garden, or brainstorming an idea.

You've used it once 2+ years ago and wrote it off completely. Do you also still do your laundry with a wasboard and clothesline? Is the Internet just a fad also?

It's has value. It also has large risk. But pandoras box is open. Those that refuse to leverage and learn it will be at a disadvantage.