If the majority of your time is spent on the easy work, you’re probably not a senior dev. If you are, maybe you shouldn’t be.

Yes, we still have to do the easy work, but it doesn’t take much time. I’d rather do it myself and know that it’s done right, than let an AI do it and have to fix all of its mistakes. In my experience, it takes the same amount of time.

any senior carpenter that is doing the easy work has a jig they custom built to do it in a tenth the time. same for a dev. templates in your ide, the use of specific libraries that make developing tests 10x faster than a normal junit test. Whatever it is, if you're a dev with decades of experience and you haven't gotten to the point that the 'grunt work' isn't a few seconds of time then you're not a good dev, you're a shit dev who sat on their ass for decades doing nothing.

And now AI has given you the chance to be even better at that, sitting on your ass doing nothing.

Even if it does write code that works, it usually (about 50% of the time in my experience) has bugs, and sometimes those bugs can be really difficult to spot. For me, it has never saved me any time. I’m either fixing something it doesn’t know how to do correctly, or going over its code with a fine tooth comb because when it says, “this is production ready code, with no bugs,” it’s usually wrong. That takes a lot of time. It’s easier for me to just write the code correctly myself.

Admittedly, I haven’t used that new model that Anthropic revoked access to the public to recently. Maybe that one is good enough for government work.