Logically, you would be right. My practical experience is I waste a lot less time trying to google multiple explanations something because one by itself isn't helping me figure it out, writing bugged PoC test code and thinking something is broken, sorting through a bunch of things that haven't been relevant for 3 versions, etc.

Of course the AI is trained on the same material we can an all find and read, but it does it orders of magnitude more quickly. The trade off is that it's not always right, but neither am I and neither are most sources on the internet right in all circumstances. But it's so fast and easy that I can iterate and evolve designs and understanding much more quickly than I could on my own.

In a cave with pen and paper is nearly what I learned with. I learned with the run time, msdn, notepad and the cmd line. And yes you do end up in many situations where you simply don't have or can't use a full on ide everytime. Sounds like you've never really left your comfort zones and stuck your neck out in some tech you don't understand quite yet. Or worked in areas under strict software controls.

It sounds like you are a much better developer than me, but to be fair I've had to teach myself everything using nothing but books and Google for thirty years. I've rarely had the luxury of working with someone who had the knowledge to mentor me, and never got a degree outside an AAS in electronics, so I've probably missed some critical skills along the way.

In a lot of ways, the AI fills that role because it's better at answering questions than it is writing code. Earlier today it was explaining to me how a DOM selector could return a stale element in some cases in a failing end to end test. It took a few back and forths with some code examples before I really understood why the selectors might not be working.

It also suggested some code changes that I had to push back on because, even though the code had errors, the errors weren't causing the problem. While building an array of validators I had awaited them, causing them to run serially instead of in parallel during Promise.all(). So you definitely have to know what you're doing to avoid having the AI waste your time (or at least more time than it takes to push back).

I'm still trying to debug it, but without the AI, I'd be googling the fuck out of typescript syntax, JavaScript idiosyncrasies, and a whole testing framework I've never seen before.

So...

if the only real value that AI provides is "you don't need to know the libraries you're using"

...returns false.