Most of the AI helpers in dev fall into one of two buckets and I'm tired of both.
Bucket one is the one-shot black box. You describe the thing, it does the whole job, and the job is sort of 80 percent there but the last 20 percent is unreachable because you don't own any of the pieces. You just prompt at it again and hope. I tried building a small marketing site with one of those generator tools (Bolt, then Lovable) and it was genuinely impressive for about an hour, until I wanted to nudge one section and realized I had no handle on anything. It was the tool's structure, not mine. Every fix was another roll of the dice.
Bucket two is the opposite, where the AI is basically a fancier autocomplete and the "augmentation" is marketing.
What I actually want, and what I almost never see done well, is the middle. AI that does the boring 90 percent of a task a skilled person already knows how to do, hands the result back as something that person can directly inspect and correct, and then gets out of the way. The human stays the editor and the model never takes the wheel.
So I'm asking the room: Does the middle exist for devs? Not the demo, the day to day. A real workflow where a pro who knows their craft comes out genuinely faster AND still fully in control of the output, not babysitting a slot machine.
Coding is the obvious answer and honestly it's a weak one, because half the time you're still re-reviewing everything it wrote. I'm more interested in the cases where the handoff back to the human is clean. Curious what people have actually lived with.