There is a chunk of devs using AI that do it not because they believe it makes them more productive in the present but because it might do so in the near future thanks to advances on AI tech/models, and then some do it because they think it might be required from them to do it this way by their bosses at some point in the future, so they can show preparedness and give the impression of being up to date with how the field evolves, even if at the end it turns out it doesn't speed up things that much.
That line of thinking makes no sense to me honestly.
We are years into this, and while the models have gotten better, the guard rails that have to be put on these things to keep the outputs even semi useful are crazy. Look into the system prompts for Claude sometime. And then we have to layer all these additional workflows on top... Despite the hype I don't see any way we get to this actually being a more productive way to work anytime soon.
And not only are we paying money for the privilege to work slower (in some cases people are shelling out for multiple services) but we're paying with our time. There is no way working this way doesn't degrade your fundamental skills, and (maybe) worse the understanding of how things actually work.
Although I suppose we can all take solice in the fact that our jobs aren't going anywhere soon. If this is what it takes to make these things work.
And most importantly, we're paying with our brain and skills degradation. Once all these services stop being subsidised there will be a massive amount of programmers who no longer can code.
I'm sorry to be blunt here, but the fact you're looking at idiotic use of Claude.md system prompts tells me you're not actually looking at the most productive users, and your opinion doesn't even cover 'where we are'.
I don't blame people who think this. I've stopped visiting Ai Subreddits because the average comment and post is just terrible, with some straight up delusional.
But broadly speaking - in my experience - either you have your documentation set up correctly and cleanly such that a new junior hire could come in and build or fix something in a few days without too many questions. Or you don't. That same distinction seems to cut between teams who get the most out of AI and those that insist everybody must be losing more time than it costs.
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I suspect we could even flip it around: the cost it takes to get an AI functioning in your code base is a good proxy for technical debt.
The claim I was responding to you was that some people use our friends the magic robots not because they think they are useful now, but because they think they might be useful in the future.
