I'm not a leading edge AI user. I have used Tabnine for the last few years, but mostly as a smarter auto-complete. Handy and time saving but nothing earth shaking. Mostly I was a skeptic. But using Cline with Claude Sonnet 4 lately has definitely changed my attitude.
One of the first things I noticed was the "rubberducky" effect. Just the effort of explaining a problem to AI often helps think of a solution. Explaining a problem to another person (or an AI) is even better because they ask questions and offer solutions. Claude often says "I see the problem" when it's totally off track. That's a little annoying, but it's no worse than what a person would do. And often those wacky ideas can spark some new ideas or avenues to explore.
A more surprising aspect is that it feels like I'm collaborating. I've been solo programming for most of my (long) career, but the last five years working remotely has exaggerated that. No one reads the majority of my code or comments on it. It's not that I'm socializing with the AI, but suddenly I have someone I can "talk" to about it. What does this do? Do we need that? What if we did xyz? Isn't that dangerous? It might not "know" the code like a true collaborator, but it's a very close approximation. And it never hurts to be exposed to other ways of doing things.
I don't vibe code with AI. I want the end code to be as good as I can make it. And with current AI that means keeping a very close watch on what it's doing. Like a beginning programmer, it seldom gets a good solution on the first try. It often requires reviewing changes closely and not being afraid to reject them. Often, you have to steer it to an elegant solution. I'm working on heavily used production code, not a throwaway toy project.
The agent approach seems to be a fundamental improvement. It's impressive to watch Claude add debugging statements, run the code, "look" at the output, and repeat until it tracks down the issue. At the same time, it can also make quite blatant mistakes so you need to be watching closely.
Honestly, I miss writing code when I'm working with AI. It's like pair programming with someone who never gives you the keyboard. Of course, there's nothing stopping me from writing some of the code myself, and I do. But when Claude can spit it out faster than I can type, it seems pointless not to let it.
One of Claude's quirks is that it has a positive tone. It's always saying "good idea" or "you're absolutely right". I found that a little goofy at first, but once I got used to it I find I like it. Who doesn't like positive feedback? I know it's meaningless, but I find when I use less positive models, I miss it.