The difference is that one can make good cloth with a loom using less effort than before. With AI one has to choose between less effort, or good quality. You can't get both.
Have you actually seriously tried using an AI? It really isn't that hard to get good code with less effort using an AI. Just manage the scope of the tasks you give it. And of course, review the code that it generates. And of course, do NOT vibe code.
And I've actually grown quite fond of the "review the selected code (that I wrote) and make suggestions for improvements, but don't actually make any changes" prompt. Or "is this code correct?" And AIs are also exceptionally good at doing large-scale code refactoring. So I am actually producing even better code with less effort.
Yes, it requires good judgement -- something that you learn by doing. And developing a sense of what an AI can and cannot handle. Although I am, truthfully, falling behind the curve on that, as coding AIs are making major leaps and bounds in the complexity of what they can deal with, and the quality you can expect out of them, that changes on pretty much a monthly basis. I was quite amazed to get a C++ port of a 3,900 line python library to write to professional standards, in about 5 prompts total, including .deb packaging, test cases, and .md API documentation.
If you are basing your judgements on anything earlier than Claude 4.5 Sonnet(or any of the ChatGPT models prior to 5.2 Codex, which seems to be the first in the ChatGPT series of models that seems to be halfway comparable to Claude 4.5 Sonnet), then you urgently need to give it another try. Avoid any of the lite models. The difference between old and new models is dramatic. (Currently still figuring out what Claude 4.6 Sonnet is capable of. I haven't yet had a chance to feed it something difficult).
