I like AI coding tools. I use them myself, and my teams use them too. That is probably the most important thing to say up front, because I do not mean this as an anti-AI post.
The leverage is real. Scaffolding is faster. Boilerplate is cheaper. First drafts come together much more quickly. People get unstuck faster than they used to. I have seen tasks that used to chew up half a day shrink to twenty or thirty minutes. I have also had those moments where a model gives you just enough momentum to get through the part of the work you were already avoiding.
I still find that genuinely useful.
That is also why I find the current conversation a bit frustrating. It often swings between two extremes: either AI is magic and the old engineering rules do not matter anymore, or AI is trash and serious teams should avoid relying on it. Neither feels true to me. The tools are useful. Sometimes very useful. But they do not remove the need for judgment. If anything, they make judgment more important, because the system can now absorb bad decisions faster and at greater volume.
The moment it changed for me
