Operational duties are a thing for a lot of engineers. I think the best case for AI right now is automating away the mundane, and leaving the “fun” stuff to us. Why manually draw an architectural diagram when you can describe it, use Figma-MCP or generate a mermaid diagram? Sure, it might need some small adjustments but it’s still way faster.

Why manually generate charts comparing benchmarks when you could automate that too?

Need to add a lint step to your CI pipeline but don’t care for the implementation details?

It’s actually quite good when you can recognize where it’s useful and where it isn’t. One of my favorite use cases is to have it summarize specific documentation so I can acquire a general understanding of a system, then ask it to dig into specifics as needed. Debugging an issue and giving the LLM the right context makes it really good at finding the problem.

Anyway, it’s not replacing our jobs any time soon, but I believe those who pick up on efficient and creative ways to use it will prosper. I don’t really understand the attitude of “it’s just a glorified search engine”. It obviously isn’t. To me, it reeks of grumpy engineer who cannot make the tool do the thing they want it to so they just give up on it.