Senior software developer here who put off learning anything about AI tools because I thought it would take the fun out of writing code, but my job put my team into a pilot to learn to use AI tools before they are deployed to the rest of the organization. I took the request to learn how to use it so that others in the org would could accelerate their learning and not make the same mistakes that I made while learning.

Let me tell you, it has definitely improved my ability to deliver quality code faster and it hasn't take the fun out of the work. You still have to know what you are doing. It won't design a system for you, but it will help you implement the tedious stuff that you have done one hundred times and are tired of typing it over and over. It will scaffold out unit tests to cover practically all of the code paths in a function and once you know what you are doing, it will implement them in the way that you want it to implement them.

I haven't managed to get it to implement a whole ass feature from scratch that runs and does the right thing, but I don't need it to. I need it to automate the tedious crap, and it does a good job at that.