In 2024 I made two GitHub commits.
In 2025 that number was 561.
It would be easy to interpret that as AI suddenly making engineers dramatically more productive. My experience has been slightly different. In many cases I spend days, sometimes even a full week, reading and evaluating AI-generated code before deciding how to proceed.
What has changed is not the speed of typing code, but the cost of experimentation. Trying a new framework, testing an architectural idea, or exploring a direction that might not work has become significantly easier. The overhead required to get something running is much lower.
Software engineering was never primarily about syntax. The harder problems have always been structural: designing systems, choosing abstractions, deciding what belongs where, and organizing code so it continues to make sense over time.
AI now handles much of the code that used to be written by hand. What remains is the part that was always the real work.