It has always been extremely annoying to fight with people who mistake the ability of building or engaging with complicated systems (like your regex) with competency.
I work in building AI for a very complex application, and I used to be in the top 0.1% of Python programmers (by one metric) at my previous FAANG job, and Claude has completely removed any barriers I have between thinking and achieving. I have achieved internal SOTA for my company, alone, in 1 week, doing something that previously would have taken me months of work. Did I have to check that the AI did everything correctly? Sure. But I did that after saving months of implementation time so it was very worth it.
We're now in the age of being ideas-bound instead of implementation-bound.
Starting with week three the overall structure of the code base is done, but the actual implementation is lacking. Whenever I run out of tokens I just started programming by hand again. As you keep doing this, the code base becomes ever more familiar to you until you're at a point where you tear down the AI scaffolding in the places where it is lacking and keep it where it makes no difference.
> If the result is something you can't explain than slow down and follow the steps it takes as they are taken.
The problem is I can explain it. But it's rote and not malleable. I didn't do the work to prove it to myself. Its primary form is on the page, not in my head, as it were.
I still wrote bugs. I'd bet that my bugs/LoC has remained static if not decreased with AI usage.
What I do see is more bugs, because the LoC denominator has increased.
What I align myself towards is that becoming senior was never about knowing the entire standard library, it was about knowing when to use the standard library. I spent a decade building Taste by butting my head into walls. This new AI thing just requires more Taste. When to point Claude towards a bug report and tell it to auto-merge a PR and when to walk through code-gen function by function.
The AI can help with that too. Ask it "How would one think about this issue, to prove that what was done here is correct?" and it will come up with somethimg to help you ground that understanding intuitively.
It also doesn't help that Claude ends every recommendation with "Would you like me to go ahead and do that for you?" Eventually people get tired and it's all to easy to just nod and say "yes".