Every job post now says "we expect you to use AI in your daily workflow." Good — because used well, an AI coding agent is a real multiplier. Used badly, it's a confident intern that ships bugs. After months of building and shipping merged open-source PRs with an agent in the loop, here's what actually changed — and what didn't.
What genuinely got faster
Navigating unfamiliar codebases. Dropping into a repo I've never seen and asking "where is X handled and why" collapses hours into minutes. This is the single biggest win — not writing code, but understanding it.
Boilerplate and tests. Regression tests, argument parsing, config plumbing — the stuff you know how to write but don't want to. The agent drafts, I review.
Refactors with a spec. "Replace this nested loop with a vectorized construction, preserve ordering and the guards" → a clean patch I then verify.
