I just had what you might probably describe as the opposite experience. I was sat at a very important all hands meeting by our senior tech leader with about 100 people or so .who was mandating an AI goal for every employee on workday, he basically says that “if we all do not learn to adapt to AI, we will all get left behind” , and he had presented how to utilise spec driven development. He opened up the room for Q&A…
However, even though I've never worked with CassandraDB, I feel pretty confident that I could do it with Claude Code. Not just "do it for me", but more like "I have done a lot of database migrations in my time, but haven't worked with CassandraDB in particular. Can you explain to me the complexities of this migration, and come up with a plan for doing it, given the specifics of this project?"
That question alone is already a massive improvement over a few years ago. I don't feel like I was using my "critical thinking muscles" when I tried to figure out how the hell to get hadoop to run on windows, that was just an exercise in frustration as none of the documentation matched the actual experience I was getting. Doing it together with Claude Code would be so much easier, because it'll say something like "Oh yeah this is because you still need to install XYZ, you can do that by running this line here: ...".
Now I'm not saying that Claude Code, and agentic in general, isn't taking away some of my critical thinking: it really is. But it also allows me to learn new skills much more quickly. It feels more like pair programming with someone who is a better programmer than me, but a much worse architect. The trick is to keep challenging yourself to take an active role in the process and not just tell it to "do it", I think.