I have 10 years of experience. I am a reasonable engineer. I can tell you that about half of the hype on twitter is real. It is a real blessing for small teams.
We have 100k DAU for a consumer crud app. We built and maintain everything in-house with 3 engineers. This would have taken atleast 10 engineers 3-4 years back.
We don't have a bug list. We are not "vibe coding" , 2 of us understand almost all of the codebase. We have processes to make sure the core integrity of codebase doesn't go for a toss.
None has touched the editor in months.
Even the product folks can raise a PR for small config changes from slack.
Velocity is through the roof and code quality is as good if not better than when we write by hand.
We refactor almost A LOT more than before because we can afford to.
I love it.
AI is already better at understanding code than 99.99% of human, the more I use it the more I believe this is true. It can draw connections between dots far quicker and accurate than a human could ever be.
At very least, AI is going to be a must even as a co-supervisor to your project
What in doubt right now, is whether AI can manage a codebase fully autonomously without bring it down, which I doubt it can at the moment. Be it 4.6 or 5.4, they always, almost always, add code instead of removing them, the sheer complexity will explode at certain point.
But that is my assessment for models TODAY, who knows where they will end up being in 6 months. AI is entering the recursive self improvement phase, that roadmap is laying in front our eyes, what it can and would unlock is truly, truly unpredictable.
I am both intrigued and scared.