Another perspective: AI reduces brain effort in some domains which actually frees up brain juice that can be applied elsewhere.
What does require "brain effort" from me is making educated decisions. Mostly during planning to figure out which pros/cons of each possible approach are actually relevant for our situation - AI does this poorly, makes lots of wrong assumptions if you don't steer it correctly, and noticing these + correcting AI on them requires "brain effort" too. Then the part of code review where you think about what can go wrong. AI still sucks at figuring out edge cases. It doesn't "know" the entire codebase like I do, its context only has "the parts of codebase deemed relevant".
Before AI I could jump from 30 minutes of hard thinking into an hour of coding during which my brain essentially rested, before returning to hard thinking again. Nowadays those hour-long coding sessions turn into 5-10 minutes of watching AI do something.
So for me using AI doesn't "free up brain juice", it instead makes me use my "brain effort" more, and in a workplace environment gives me less time to rest and makes me more tired, cause nowadays bosses expect us to work faster + colleagues working faster means more review requests.
What amazing breakthroughs were achieved thanks to brain juice freed by AI usage? What great works of art were created?
Hard to quantify though, as most, other than the AI companies don't usually advertise their AI usage.
Trainline is practically unusable for purchasing itineraries that go accross multiple european countries. GitHub Actions now contains a bunch of extremely frustrating random bugs. Grammarly somehow gives worse copy recommendations.
Parent suggests the perspective where using AI allows to free up the "brain juice", and utilize it elsewhere. What you describe is AI allowing you to mitigate some limitations that prevented you trying something. So not the same.
I want to make it clear that I'm an LLM luddite. I mostly find the things distasteful and obnoxious. But there are definitely use-cases where they can do what's essentially bitch work and save a lot of time that would otherwise be a waste. It's a tool that can be used for specific things. I don't use them for everything.
I measured it in time and personal energy. I spend time working on something creative as opposed to working on something procedural. If I'd had to write the macros by hand, it would have sucked a lot of joy out of the project and would have delayed me probably much longer than it would have just to write the macros.
Your line of questioning is obnoxious and indicative that your original suspicions are false, yet you're too pigheaded to just let it go and admit that you are wrong.