I have been writing software for about 20 years (following on from OChem PhD and research for a few years). I am 'senior' and get paid plenty in Oz...
I have aphantasia - I can't visualise/picture things in my mind, so I use pen and paper or whiteboards A LOT!
I create various ERDs, mind maps, sequence diagrams etc. I use a ReMarkable which makes it a bit easier to move stuff around and makes it more effective.
I get that some people might think it is 'pure romanticism', but pen and paper has been crucial for my success.
> However the novelty of what can be solved is very surprising.
I've read that the 'surprise' factor is much reduced when you actually see just how much data these things are trained on - far more than a human mind can possibly hold and (almost) endlessly varied. I.e. there is 'probably' something in the training set close to what 'surprised' you.
Github copilot is so good at writing CRUD db queries that it feels as easy as an ORM, but without the baggage, complexity, and the n+1 performance issues.
'I have a database table Foo, here is the DDL: <sql>, create CRUD end points at /v0/foo; and use the same coding conventions used for Bar.'
I find it copies existing code style pretty well.