Seasoned devs have observed that LLMs “reward existing best practices” - things like writing clear specs, having good tests, doing code reviews, etc., all become even more powerful when an AI is involved. In my experience, the AI lets me operate at a higher level of abstraction (focusing on design, interface, architecture) while it churns out the boilerplate, but I need to have those high-level skills first. As Simon Willison notes, almost everything that makes someone a senior engineer (designing systems, managing complexity, knowing what to automate vs hand-code) is what now yields the best outcomes with AI.