My recent experience: I'm porting an app to Mac. It's been in my backlog for ~2 years. With Claude I had a functional prototype in under a day getting the major behavior implemented. I spent the next two weeks refactoring the original app to share as much logic as possible. The first two days was lots of fun. The refactoring was also something I wanted to flush out unit tests, still enjoyable.
The worst part was debugging really bugs introduced to my code from 5 years ago. My functions had naming issues describing the behavior wrong, confusing Claude, that I needed to re-understand to add new features.
Parts of coding are frustrating. Using AI is frustrating for different reasons.
The most frustrating part was rebasing with git to create a sensible history (which I've had to do without AI in the past), reviewing the sheer volume of changes (14k lines) and then deciding "do I want my name on this" which involved cleaning up all the linter warnings I'd self imposed on myself.
Before I also had to code it and then make sure it had no issues.
Now I can skip the coding and then just have something spit out something which I can evaluate whether I believe is a good implementation of my solution or not.
Of course, you need the skill to know good from bad but for medium to senior devs, AI is incredibly useful to get rid of the mundane task of actually writing code, while focusing on problem solving with critical review of magically generated code.
You have just transformed your job from developer to manual spec maintainer - a clerk who has to painstakingly check everything.