My first lead developer was an old school developer who preferred to look up guidelines and solutions in physical books he had on his desk. Nobody should waste time reinventing the wheel.

To answer your first question, it’s faster for me because I can formulate my request as a developer as if my AI agent was also a developer (in a sense it is) faster than I can figure out how to implement it on my own, especially in a new language and ecosystem. I didn’t just prompt Claude Fable at Max thinking capacity “yo dawg make me a game for iPhone that will make me rich just pick whatever style and stuff” and let it run for a week or two. I brainstormed the idea of the game with my AI agent (Opus 5.5 mostly at High), asked for suggestions, adjusted its proposal to my liking, asked it to flesh out an implementation plan for each milestone of the development journey, worked on different topics as we progressed (introducing complex graphics was sometimes challenging which required a bit of guidance for it to get the assets right), had it create a level editor for me because explaining every single thing was taking too long when I could just drag the sprite a little on my screen and tell it to compile my changes, we worked on ambience audio and sound effects at multiple levels (background, middle, foreground), and the list goes on.

A LOT of work has gone into this project, but without an AI I would not have gotten any further in the time spent than barely figuring out how to get even a simple round ball bouncing on a flat surface in Unity. With AI I’m looking at a feature complete game ready to ship to the App Store after the last bit details have been settled (advertisement laws and whether to monetise one way or the other or not at all, mostly).

AI is an incredibly powerful technology and when you wield it correctly you can go from 1x or 10x engineering to 100x or even 1000x at minimal risk (because you mitigated it along the way).