Honestly, I’m surprised to learn there are developers who don’t use AI tools at all in 2025.
I’ve been a software engineer for about 10 years, and these days Claude Code is basically my coding buddy and documentation assistant(and yes, I’m one of those devs who doesn’t love writing docs or design docs encouraged by big corporate) — and I use ChatGPT daily for research, quick explanations, or brainstorming. At this point it feels weird to work without them.
Though they’re not as magic as I want. I have to do the followings with AI:
- review everything AI spits out, because it can sound confident but be dead wrong
- Clear instruction and rules make a huge difference (like claude.local.md)
yes, writing them can feel like doing documentation ...
Even with those quirks, the net gain is huge for me, I just need to learn how to mentor them — AI saves time on documentation, debugs, gives me new ideas, and helps on side projects.
From my perspective, AI is unstoppable. We’re at the start of a new era in software development, and within 5 years it’s going to replace many different roles in our circle or other indurstry : )