alt Hacker NewsFWIW, when a problem truly is weird, AI & vibe coding tends to not be able to solve it. Maybe you can use AI to help you spend more time working on the weird problems.
When I play sudoku with an app, I like to turn on auto-fill numbers, and auto-erase numbers, and highlighting of the current number. This is so that I can go directly to the crux of the puzzle and work on that. It helps me practice working on the hard part without having to slog through the stuff I know how to do, and generally speaking it helps me do harder puzzles than I was doing before. BTW, I’ve only found one good app so far that does this really well.
With AI it’s easier to see there are a lot of problems that I don’t know how to solve, but others do. The question is whether it’s wasteful to spend time independently solving that problem. Personally I think it’s good for me to do it, and bad for my employer (at least in the short term). But I can completely understand the desire for higher-ups to get rid of 90% of wheel re-invention, and I do think many programmers spend a lot of time doing exactly that; independently solving problems that have already been solved.
You touch on an aspect of AI-driven development that I don't think enough people realize: choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing.
The hard problems should be solved with our own brains, and it behooves us to take that route so we can not only benefit from the learnings, but assemble something novel so the business can differentiate itself better in the market.
For all the other tedium, AI seems perfectly acceptable to use.
Where the sticking point comes in is when CEOs, product teams, or engineering leadership put too much pressure on using AI for "everything", in that all solutions to a problem should be AI-first, even if it isn't appropriate—because velocity is too often prioritized over innovation.