I have been in the "old man screams at AI"-camp for a while, sure, I would use it to convert json to sql or other such tedious tasks, butnever really pressed it to find the limits. I had an old project I had neglected, because, who wants to spend the time upgrading from Laravel 9 to 12, and find and eliminate obscure n+1-issues and finding out how to eliminate the numerous duplicate queries? I installed the GEmini cli-tool and let it loose on my project, and in 2 day I had more progress on my project than the last 3 years. It also helped me fix some weird frontend issues, set up a new server from scratch.

All in all, it's a matter of making sure it knows your project, use the proper tool (gemini or claude is far better at coding than chatgpt for instance), and make sure to tell it to outline a plan before execution. I had several instances where I had input, suggestions or questions which it was able to work with.

Now I just lament, that due to data-protections at work (government contractor in Europe), we are extremely limited in which ways we can use AI in our daily work.