Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write.
The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge the gap. I am generalizing, but I can see how AI can 10x the work of the typical engineer working in Startups in California. Even your comment about curiosity highlights this. It's the beginning of an even more K-shaped engineering workforce.
Even people who were previously not great engineers, if they are curious and always enjoyed the learning part - they are now supercharged to learn new ways of building, and they are able to try it out, learn from their mistakes at an accelerated pace.
Unfortunately, this group, the curious ones, IMHO is a minority.
The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge the gap. I am generalizing, but I can see how AI can 10x the work of the typical engineer working in Startups in California. Even your comment about curiosity highlights this. It's the beginning of an even more K-shaped engineering workforce.
Even people who were previously not great engineers, if they are curious and always enjoyed the learning part - they are now supercharged to learn new ways of building, and they are able to try it out, learn from their mistakes at an accelerated pace.
Unfortunately, this group, the curious ones, IMHO is a minority.