"If they felt like it" is key here: in my experience, AI makes it very easy to not feel like anything and just trust whatever the AI comes up with. The barrier to diving deep into code, or researching any other topic by myself, has become higher.

At the same time the barrier to getting some results has become much lower, especially for complex topics I knew nothing about. So that seems great, but I keep running into cases where I do check sources and the AI turns out to have summarised it incorrectly.