I remember one of my stories related to crunch time. I was working on a back office system for an electrical company, and we were on a tight deadline. I had to deliver 3 big CRUD features, each with their own tables, forms, and validation logic. Each of the form contains 15-20 fields, with combination of text input, dropdown, date and file upload fields. All of them needed Excel export features with different formats, integrated into one big dashboard with multiple formulas to stitch the numbers together. Nothing intellectually hard, just an enormous amount of manual work that had to be done precisely and fast.
I remember locking myself in a hotel room for 3 days to finish this. Non stop typing from morning to 2am, stopping only to eat. After that I still had to provision a VPS from scratch, install the database, run the seed script, then prepare for the presentation on Monday morning. It was very tedious but somehow I still enjoyed it. I had maybe 2-3 instances of this happening pre AI era. From that crunch time I learn a ton. learned the intricacies of the language, how to create templates, some sysadmin stuff. The repetition builds muscle memory and tacit knowledge. The knowledge comes from the process.
That same project today is probably a few hours of good prompting. It's nostalgic to remember it and amazing how AI changes that. Now the questions how will those crunch time look now ?
Well you don't need to manually type the code anymore, but you still need to prompt it as clear as possible. Define the requirements, the test case, the limitations, the security constraints. Points your coding agent into the correct markdown (lols). You still need to check the LLM output, review the code, verify if the requirements actually implemented. You still need to test it manually, as shopisticated as agent browser may be, all the code, the resulting changes is still attached to your name. The struggle moved from hand to mind. You probably can do this in a morning in some coffee shop but the accountability is still there, and your cognitive load will be more spent because now you need to make multiple decisions faster.
We all need to adapt, and we will. It's a disservice to your business to not use the best tools available, regardless of how you feel about it.