AI coding is easier

Remember that old engineering joke? "We can make it Cheap, Fast and Good. Pick 2 of those."

AI adds a fourth option, 'Easy'. Yes, AI makes work easier, sometimes without removing people from the pipeline at all.

You may think easier is not needed, but you'd be very wrong and probably delusional. Nobody works all the time, we need micro breaks, or we break.

I remember when Dev and Ops were really separate and seemed to hate each other. I worked with both, and they both had it easy and rough.

+----------+ -- Blame Game --> +----------+
|   DEV    |                   |   OPS    |
| Code     |                   | Deploy   |
| Feature  |                   | Monitor  |
| Test     |                   | Fix      |
+----------+                   +----------+
     ^                              |
     |                              |
     +------ Blame Game <-----------+

The Ops team had stress and responsibility, but they also could kick back and browse the web while they watched some progress bar on their 4th monitor. The Dev team had crunch time, gruelling 12 hour days for a couple of weeks before a software release, but mostly they could go take a walk while their C++ recompiled. These mental breaks matter. Its during these breaks that problems really get solved, not when you're stressed hunting an intermittent bug or trying to bring up a dead server with a customer on the phone.

Modern 'Agile' workplaces seeks to replace this illusory downtime with meetings designed to keep people moving forward, but ironically where everyone is half checked-out most of the time because meetings with too many people tend to do that. However even that can be a good thing, and I'm talking about being checked-out in a meeting, not listening to problems that don't involve you.

We need these micro-breaks to replenish our acetylcholine, which does runs low when we think too much. We make less mistakes when we have more of it.

AI insists on these micro breaks, you can't constantly prompt it, you are forced to wait sometimes. That makes it easier to think better. We are more creative after we let our mind wander a bit. That is one of the unsung reasons AI coding is so much faster. While the AI implements your last idea, you're thinking about the next problem to solve while spinning your fidget toy. To someone strolling by your desk, you look like you're wasting time, but in the end you're getting results that are Cheaper, Faster, and Gooder.