> what was the point of it all if i didn’t learn a thing?
Money. Freedom. Supporting a family. Doing things faster. Keeping up with changing times. etc..
There are a ton of different answers, and it depends on your goals.
> coding isn’t about the finished product
Again, to each their own.
As a senior software engineer, AI still surprises me with concepts I didn't know about from time to time. I think spending the time to grok the code it generates is about as invaluable as the code's functionality.
As in the past, however, nothing's stopping people from copy-pasting code found online and never improving their internal toolkit. AI will not only uphold that status quo, but amplify it exponentially.
Example?
But for a recent example, I learned to stop worrying and love macros in Elixir. Even `defmodule` and `def/defp` are themselves macros.