Yes the fallacy here is that AI will replace eingineers any time soon. For the foreseeable future prompts will need to be written and curated by people who already know how to do it, but will just end up describing it in increasingly complex detail and then running tests against it. Doesn't sound like a future that has that many benefits to anyone.

There's no clear threshold with an universal answer. Sometimes prompting will be easier, sometimes writing things yourself. You'll have to add some debugging time to both sides in practice. Also, you can be opportunistic - you're going to write a commit anyway, right? A good commit message will be close to the prompt anyway, so why not start with that and see if you want to write your own or not?

> I also get to do a code review.

Don't you review your own code after some checkpoint too?

Spend your cognitive energy thinking about the higher level architecture, test cases and performance concerns rather than the minutia and you’ll find that you can get more work done with the less overall mental load.

This reduction in cognitive load is the real force multiplier.

Personally I found it quite fun to give specification and have ChatGPT find me a Python code that implements it: https://chatgpt.com/share/6777debc-eaa4-8011-81c5-35645ae433... . Or the additional polygon edge smoothing code: https://chatgpt.com/share/6773d634-de88-8011-acf8-e61b6b913f...

Sure, the green screen code didn't work exactly as I wished, but it made use of OpenCV functions I was not aware of and it was quite easy to make the required fixes.

In my mind it is exactly the opposite: yes, I've already done the hard work of formulating how I want the problem solved, so why not have the computer do the busywork of writing the code down?

Admittedly some people are using AI out of curiosity rather than because they get tangible benefit.

But aside from those situations, do you not think that the developers using AI - many of whom are experienced and respected - must be getting value? Or do you think they are deluded?

You can ask it for alternative methods and even to document their pros and cons.