> the process of AI-centric software development is better regarded as a pair-design and pair-coding process, treating the AI more like a person than a tool.
This is the part that makes me throw up in my mouth a bit, I'd rather pair with a human. But whatever, I'm old. You'll have to excuse me as as there are a lot of nefarious-looking clouds out there.
Sure, but the AI is faster & cheaper than a human, or even of a team of humans. So, if you are a solo developer and can't afford to hire a team of humans to help accelerate your project, you now have the option of using AI instead.
It seems the capability and utility of these models/products is increasing very fast. Agentic tools like Claude Code that run locally in your terminal and therefore have access to all your dev/test tools and environment is a huge advance since now the output isn't just code, it's fully tested debugged code, that passes whatever tests and quality gates you tell it are necessary.
At the same time that the tooling has improved, so have the models, and only very recently (last 6 months or so). People swear by Opus 4.5, and I've also been impressed by Gemini 3.0. A year ago I was also much more skeptical of the utility of AI for serious use, but they've improved a lot.