What's your magic bullet

The other day I saw a post of someone saying the AI is at best an assistant if not just a distraction.  I do not understand how someone can come to this conclusion.

I have used AI agents for a good while.  I have used them to help me write code, to help me debug code, to help me write documentation, to help me write tests, to help me design systems.  And in all of these cases, the AI has been a huge help.

Was it perfect?  No.  Did it just magically do my work for me?  No.  I had to learn how to get useful results and make AI a useful tool.  I had to learn how to prompt it effectively.  I had to verify its output and certainly had to mold its results into my solution.  AI has been a tool, one of many I have, and it is helpful.  But a distraction?  No.  Not at all.

Too often engineering is focused on finding a magic bullet that will solve all problems at once. But in reality, engineering is about making trade-offs and finding a solution that moves the product forward.

Quality suffers?  Let's create all kinds of unit and integration tests and make that part of the build process. Only to find there's still bugs.

Time to market suffers?  Let's use agile development practices to deliver features incrementally and get feedback early and often.  Only to find you still spend a lot of time not writing code.

So in the end, did these solutions solve everything?  Probably not.  Yes, they helped improve your solutions (otherwise you wasted a lot of time).  But I also willing to bet, they also identified new challenges that needed to be solved.  But that's the nature of engineering.  It's an iterative process of continuous improvement.