As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing.

As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive benefit.

You might spend hours thinking up cool/interesting ideas, but not have the time available to try them out.

Now, I can quickly kick off a coding agent to try out any hare-brained ideas I might come up with. The cost of doing so is very low (in terms of time and $$$), so I get to try out far more and weirder approaches than before when the costs were higher. If those ideas don't play out, fine, but I have a good enough success rate with left-field ideas to make it far more justifiable than before.

Also, it makes playing around with one-person projects a lot practical. Like most people with partner & kids, my down time is pretty precious, and tends to come in small chunks that are largely unplannable. For example, last night I spent 10 minutes waiting in a drive-through queue - that gave me about 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. Absolutely useful to me personally, whereas last year I would've simply sat there annoyed waiting to be serviced.

I know some people have an "outsourcing Lego" type mentality when it comes to AI coding - it's like buying a cool Lego kit, then watching someone else assemble it for you, removing 99% of the enjoyment in the process. I get that, but I prefer to think of it in terms of being able to achieve orders of magnitude more in the time I have available, at close to zero extra cost.