With an extra 23 months of experience under my belt since then I'm comfortable to say that the effect has stayed steady for me over time, and even increased a bit.
100% agree with this, sometimes I feel I'm becoming too reliant on it - but I step back and see how much more ambitious of projects I take on, and finish quickly still, due to it.
Claude 3.7 basically one-shot a multiplayer game's server-authority rollback netcode with client-side prediction and interpolation.
I spent months of my life in my 20s trying to build a non-janky implementation of that and failed which was really demoralizing.
Over the last couple weekends I got farther than I was able to get in weeks or months. And when I get stumped, I have the confidence of being able to rubber-duck my way through it with an LLM if it can't outright fix it itself.
Though I also often wonder how much time I have left professionally in software. I try not to think about that. :D
You know the 80/20 "rule"? Well, that last 20% is what I believe will keep us around.
AI is going to be a great multiplier but if the base is 0, you can multiply it by whatever you want.
I feel ChatGPT-like products are like outsourcing to cheaper countries, it might work for some but for anyone else, now they have to hire more expensive people to fix/redo the work done by the cheaper labor. This seems to be exactly the same but using AI.
With an extra 23 months of experience under my belt since then I'm comfortable to say that the effect has stayed steady for me over time, and even increased a bit.