The short version
When you hire me, you are renting my mind for your project. AI lets me spend more of that time budget on the parts that matter most. Used well, it makes your project faster, cheaper, and more reliable than I could make it alone. AI can handle the monotonous tasks, and speed up the trial and error phase. Used carelessly, it makes confident mistakes that don't show up until much later, usually at the worst possible time. I use AI with scrutiny. I read and understand everything it touches before it becomes a part of your product.
Where it helps
- A second set of eyes. I am a one-person shop, and humans are not perfect. AI is a great second pair of eyes. It often catches bugs earlier than I would have. In industry, software is typically peer reviewed in a process called a pull request. When I am by myself, AI can help fill that gap.
- Speed on the boring parts. Boilerplate, test scaffolding, build setup, and documentation all go a lot faster. That means more of your budget goes to the hard problems that actually need an engineer, and less to the busywork.
- Iterate faster. Before AI I'd spend a week coding up an experiment to find out that it doesn't work the way I hoped. This is a normal part of the creative process. With AI it now takes hours instead of days to find out if a software idea is going to work or not. Sometimes I'll have AI write a handful of different approaches at the same time to evaluate. This was unheard of a few years ago, and it really speeds up the trial-and-error phase of the project.
- Combing through sources. In an ideal world, all code has thorough documentation attached. In the real world, it often does not. For these cases, AI helps me get oriented to existing projects and libraries so much faster.
- Research companion. Sometimes bouncing ideas off someone (even if it's a robot) can really help spark the creative process. Just having a forum to discuss tradeoffs of various approaches and chat about what I'm working on is so valuable for me as an engineer. Sometimes engineering is about asking dumb questions, and AI is happy to answer.
What it never does
AI does not make the architecture decisions. It does not pick your parts, sign off on a design, or ship a line of code that I haven't read and understood myself. It doesn't talk to you in my place, and it never has the final say.
An experienced engineer with AI is faster and more careful. Hand the same tool to someone who does not know what they are doing, and you just get wrong answers faster and with more confidence. AI is fantastic at making you feel good and reassuring you everything is fine (even if it's not). It takes a trained eye to correct AI when it's going down the wrong path, or to know when to switch to writing code by hand if AI is falling short. The tool does not replace the judgment. That judgment is the part you are paying for.