Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate.
Maintenance is Significantly Cheaper
A habit I have been trying to form is to give an idea a shot before I fully shoot it down.
For me the difference between pre-Claude Code and post-Claude Code is so substantial that any increments between it and others (which will be better in some ways, worse in others) is not worth the hassle for such a small incremental win.
What makes learning with AI groundbreaking is that it can meet you at your skill level. Now an AI can directly address questions at your level of understanding, and even do rote work for you. This changes the learning curve.
Mastery remains difficult. Cheaters, in the long run, won't prosper here!
Creative fields are extremely competitive, and beating competition for attention requires novelty. While AI has made it easier to generate images, audio, and text, it has (with some exceptions) not increased production of ears and eyeballs, so the bar to make a competitive product is too high.
Summarizing is a core AI skill, but it doesn't help much here: Spam is already quietly shuffled into the Spam folder. A summary of junk is, well, junk. For important email, I don't want a summary: An AI is likely to produce less specifically crafted information than the sender, and I don't want to risk missing important details.