Six Months of AI Coding Tools: What Actually Stuck

The short answer: after six months, AI coding tools reliably pay off on boilerplate, forgotten syntax, and first-draft tests — but quietly cost you time on anything needing context about why, on non-obvious debugging, and on keeping a codebase coherent. Treat them as a fast, overconfident junior and keep the judgment yourself.

I went into the last six months as a skeptic — not because I doubted the tech, but because I'd watched too many "this changes everything" cycles end in a graveyard of abandoned tools. So I actually tracked it. I kept rough notes on where AI assistants helped and where they bit me, across real production work on a React and TypeScript codebase. Here's the honest ledger, with the hype filtered out.

Where they genuinely earned their keep

Boilerplate and the tedious middle. This is the uncontested win. Scaffolding a form with validation, writing the fifteenth similar API handler, converting a JSON blob into a typed interface, generating a table of test fixtures — the AI does in seconds what used to be ten minutes of joyless typing. I reclaimed real hours here, and more importantly, I stopped dreading the grunt work.

The "I know what I want, I forget the exact syntax" moments. Regex I'll write twice a year. The precise Intl.DateTimeFormat options. A gnarly TypeScript conditional type. The AI is a faster, more contextual version of searching Stack Overflow, and it reads my surrounding code so the answer actually fits.

First-draft explanations and tests. Point it at a function and ask for the edge-case tests, and it reliably surfaces three I'd have gotten to and two I'd have missed. I don't ship its tests as-is, but as a checklist of "did you think about this?" it's excellent.

Where they quietly cost me more than they saved

Anything requiring real context about why. The AI knows how the code is written; it has no idea why we made the trade-offs we did. Ask it to refactor a module and it'll happily strip out the "ugly" workaround that exists because of a specific production incident. It optimizes for code that looks clean, not code that survived contact with reality.

Debugging the non-obvious. For a shallow bug it's fine. For the race condition that only shows up under load, or the stale-cache issue that spans three services, it confidently generates plausible-looking fixes that are wrong. I burned an afternoon chasing an AI's suggestion before realizing the root cause was in a layer it never saw. A junior dev would've asked a question; the AI just answers.

The subtle architectural drift. This is the one that worries me most as a manager. Each AI suggestion is locally reasonable, but accept enough of them and your codebase slowly becomes an average of every pattern on the internet — not a coherent whole with your team's conventions. You have to actively push back, or consistency erodes one accepted completion at a time.

How my workflow actually changed

I didn't become a "prompt engineer." What changed is subtler. I now treat the AI like an eager, fast, slightly overconfident junior pair. I delegate the mechanical and the exploratory to it, and I keep the judgment firmly for myself: what to build, why, what trade-offs matter, what the code means.

The skill that got more valuable, not less, is reading code critically. When you generate code three times faster, the bottleneck moves entirely to review. I spend more of my day evaluating code than writing it — and being able to spot the subtly-wrong-but-plausible suggestion is now a core competency, not a nice-to-have.

The honest verdict

AI coding tools made me faster at the parts of the job I never liked and gave me nothing on the parts that define senior work — judgment, context, taste, and knowing which problem is actually worth solving. That's not a disappointment; it's exactly the right division of labor.

The engineers I see struggling are the ones who outsourced the thinking, not just the typing. The ones thriving use it to clear the busywork so they have more time for the hard, human parts. Six months in, I'm firmly in the second camp — and still the one responsible for every line that ships.