I think the differentiator is whether someone cares about what they build or not. Someone who doesn't care wouldn't produce masterpieces without AI, and using AI isn't going to prevent someone who does care from building something nice.
But everyone claims they care; everyone using AI is telling you that they're not like the slop merchants, that they're really building masterpieces/the next unicorn. Just like everyone using AI to write says they're just using it as a fancier spellcheck.
It doesn't seem like AI users are very good at telling how much or how well they're using it.
How can you own the design if you don't know what your design actually does?
You can't, so you do read the code.
This idea is being pushed to increase sunk costs IMO. We are told to spend huge amount of time writing specs, behaviour tests, AGENTS.md and prompts.
Pinky promise that's enough to get good output.
Pinky promise we won't invent yet another body of work the whole industry must adopt to get good output.
Pinky promise the AI tool will properly read all your work
And then of course we are told you must never trust its output !? You must review all code it produces line by line and grok it fully !
And now we have: keep challenging it, keep rejecting it, keep interrogating it... That's just fancy words for spend more money (tokens)
Wow hang on, I'm suggesting to use AI as a code writing aid, not to increase scope until owning the design becomes unreasonable.
It's been years at this point though; everyone knows where "use AI as a code writing aid" ends up.
I think the differentiator is whether someone cares about what they build or not. Someone who doesn't care wouldn't produce masterpieces without AI, and using AI isn't going to prevent someone who does care from building something nice.
But everyone claims they care; everyone using AI is telling you that they're not like the slop merchants, that they're really building masterpieces/the next unicorn. Just like everyone using AI to write says they're just using it as a fancier spellcheck.
It doesn't seem like AI users are very good at telling how much or how well they're using it.
I'd rather blowtorch my nipples off than yell at a computer all day