Cursor and Claude Code have undoubtedly accelerated certain aspects of my technical execution. In particular, root causing difficult bugs in a complicated codebase has been accelerated through the ability to generate throwaway targeted logging code and just generally having an assistant that can help me navigate and understand complex code.
However, overall I would say that AI coding tools have made my job harder in two other ways:
1. There’s an increased volume of code that requires more thorough review and/or testing or is just generally not in keeping with the overall repo design.
2. The cost is lowered for prototyping ideas so the competitive aspect of deciding what to build or which experiment to run has ramped up. I basically need to think faster and with more clarity to perform the same as I did before because the friction of implementation time has been drastically reduced.