Has AI Actually Made You a Better Developer?

I've been experimenting with AI-assisted development for the past few months while building Shopify projects and automation tools.


At first, I expected it to write entire features for me.


Instead, I found the biggest value somewhere else:

• explaining unfamiliar code
• generating boilerplate
• debugging faster
• improving documentation
• brainstorming better implementations

I still review every line before using it, but it has definitely reduced the amount of repetitive work.


That said, AI isn't perfect. It sometimes suggests outdated APIs, unnecessary complexity, or code that simply doesn't fit the project.


So I'm curious about other developers' experiences.


Do you use AI every day?


Has it genuinely improved your workflow, or do you spend just as much time correcting its mistakes?


I'd love to hear what tools you're using and where you think AI is actually useful—not just the hype.

Its making tool like in crazy speed, anyone can just start making a lot of tools and coded web pages etc. It definitely made it easy to everyone globally no matter where they from and what lang they speak

for me the daily driver stuff is exactly what you said, boilerplate and debugging. anything past a certain complexity it starts hallucinating shopify apis that got deprecated like two versions ago, especially with the checkout extensions since those changed a lot.

where it actually saves me time is reading someone elses messy code fast. drop a 300 line file in, ask what breaks if i change X, done. thats worth more to me than having it write features honestly.

the correction time thing is real though. if you dont already know what good looks like you end up shipping garbage and not noticing. its an accelerator not a replacement... makes good devs faster and lets bad ones make bigger messes quicker imo. i still keep it on a short leash for anything touching payments or webhooks.

Pretty much matches what I've seen. The checkout extension thing @Zephyroo mentioned is real, it confidently spits out the old ui extension syntax half the time and you dont notice till it breaks.

One thing that helped me is feeding it the actual current docs or a working snippet as context before asking, cuts down the deprecated api guessing a lot. Left to its own memory it just pulls whatever was common a year ago.

Daily driver for me too but same as you, boilerplate, explaining weird code, quick debugging. Anything touching webhooks or payment flow I write myself and only use it to sanity check. The "makes bad devs make bigger messes faster" line is honestly the truest part of this whole thread.