Let me start by saying that I am an experienced developer, so I doubt I'd unlearn syntax any time soon. Also the way I write with AI still has me writing a lot of the code. I use Cursor.
The way it helps me is in refactoring it sees 1 example and will apply the same pattern in the following 10 places in the code and it will suggest tailwind classes for colors, etc pretty accurately. That is in Rails.
Using AI has let me write pretty complicated Python applications, production ready, in an hour per application, even though I know no Python.
The other day in minutes I produced a bash script that let me loop through all sub-directories of a given directory, find all mp4 files, check with ffprobe if the audio stream within was flac or m4a, saved all metadata from those files into JSON using a python script it wrote and then ran ffmpeg to convert the mp4 to either flac or m4a and then reapply the metadata, if the filesize difference was within 800kb it would auto-delete the mp4.
All that in a few minutes. Obviously I could've done that either in Ruby or Bash, but this was way way way faster and it would help me debug things super quickly too.
I sometimes disable the AI suggestions when I am writing some novel code, but overall AI has released me from writing the 'boring code' and it allows me to leverage libraries and tools from different languages if the use case requires it. Super powerful!
I do understand I have the advantage of experience without AI so I am able to steer the AI towards solutions that my experience tells me are useful and I can judge the produced code pretty well. I have no idea how this all feels to a junior developer and whether it does more harm than good to their learning experience.
The way it helps me is in refactoring it sees 1 example and will apply the same pattern in the following 10 places in the code and it will suggest tailwind classes for colors, etc pretty accurately. That is in Rails.
Using AI has let me write pretty complicated Python applications, production ready, in an hour per application, even though I know no Python.
The other day in minutes I produced a bash script that let me loop through all sub-directories of a given directory, find all mp4 files, check with ffprobe if the audio stream within was flac or m4a, saved all metadata from those files into JSON using a python script it wrote and then ran ffmpeg to convert the mp4 to either flac or m4a and then reapply the metadata, if the filesize difference was within 800kb it would auto-delete the mp4.
All that in a few minutes. Obviously I could've done that either in Ruby or Bash, but this was way way way faster and it would help me debug things super quickly too.
I sometimes disable the AI suggestions when I am writing some novel code, but overall AI has released me from writing the 'boring code' and it allows me to leverage libraries and tools from different languages if the use case requires it. Super powerful!
I do understand I have the advantage of experience without AI so I am able to steer the AI towards solutions that my experience tells me are useful and I can judge the produced code pretty well. I have no idea how this all feels to a junior developer and whether it does more harm than good to their learning experience.