It sounds like you are a much better developer than me, but to be fair I’ve had to teach myself everything using nothing but books and Google for thirty years. I’ve rarely had the luxury of working with someone who had the knowledge to mentor me, so I’ve probably missed some critical skills along the way.

In a lot of ways, the AI fills that role because it’s better at answering questions than it is writing code. Earlier today it was explaining to me how a DOM selector could return a stale element in some cases because of a failing end to end test. It took a few back and forths with some code examples before I really understood why the selectors might not be working.

It also suggested some code changes that I had to push back on because, even though the code had errors, the errors weren’t causing the problem. While building an array of promises I had awaited them, causing them to run serially instead of in parallel during Promise.all(). So you definitely have to know what you’re doing to avoid having the AI waste your time (or at least more time than it takes to push back).

I’m still trying to debug it, but without the AI, I’d be googling the fuck out of typescript syntax, JavaScript idiosyncrasies, and a whole testing framework I’ve never seen before.

So…

if the only real value that AI provides is “you don’t need to know the libraries you’re using” …returns false.