I help run a small dev team and I've spent the last year trying to figure out if these tools made us faster or just made us feel faster. Genuinely not sure yet.
The wins are real but boring. Boilerplate, test scaffolding, the fifth CRUD endpoint that's basically the other four with different names. Onboarding got a bit easier too because the juniors can ask an assistant the stuff they'd feel dumb asking me for the tenth time.
Then there's everything that needs you to actually understand why the code is there. Race conditions, how two services should talk to each other, cleaning up a mess someone left behind two years ago. There the assistant is confident and wrong a lot, and confident-and-wrong is honestly worse than slow.
The thing nobody warned me about was review. We write code faster now, so there's more of it to read, and reading code is harder than writing it. We've shipped stuff that compiled, passed lint, passed the tests, and was still quietly the wrong thing, because whoever was "writing" it had mentally clocked out halfway through.
So net positive maybe? But nowhere near the 10x people keep selling. Curious about others actually using this on a team and not a weekend project. Where's it genuinely helped, and where's it just created new work in a different spot?
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