What Actually Changed in My Workflow After Two Years of AI Tools
Not the productivity multiplier the marketing promised, and not the nothing the sceptics predicted. Here is the honest accounting.
Two years in, with a lot of shipped projects behind me, here is what actually changed — with the marketing claims and the backlash both set aside.
What Genuinely Got Faster
- Starting things. The blank-file hesitation is gone. A rough first version exists in seconds and I edit from there.
- Unfamiliar territory. A new library used to cost an afternoon of documentation. Now it costs twenty minutes and a careful read of what came back.
- Tests and boilerplate. The work I used to postpone now gets done, because the activation cost dropped to near zero.
- Legacy code. Understanding someone else's undocumented system is dramatically faster.
What Did Not Change At All
Deciding what to build. Understanding what a client actually needs versus what they asked for. Choosing a data model you will not regret. Debugging a race condition that appears once a week in production.
Those were the hard parts before, and they are the hard parts now — arguably a larger share of the job than they used to be.
What Got Harder
Reviewing. When code is cheap to produce, more of it arrives, and all of it needs reading. I spend noticeably more time reviewing and less time typing. That is a good trade, but it is a real shift, and it is tiring in a different way.
Resisting plausible answers. Confidently wrong output is more dangerous than obviously wrong output. The discipline of verifying things that look right is a skill I had to deliberately build.
The Skills That Became More Valuable
- Reading code critically and quickly.
- Writing precise specifications — the better you describe a problem, the better every tool performs, AI or not.
- Knowing your domain deeply enough to spot a wrong answer instantly.
- System design, which no tool has meaningfully touched.
The Honest Summary
I ship more, and I ship more complete work — better tested, better documented, with the admin panel the budget used to cut. Not because I write code faster, but because the things that used to get dropped now fit.
The developers doing best with these tools are not the ones using them most. They are the ones who already knew what good looked like, and now get there sooner.