So before AI I had the experience, more often than not, that it would take me longer to figure out how to use someone else's thing (or get it to do some particular thing, which often turned out to be impossible), than to just make my own.

And that was before I could just ask the computer to make it for me!

But most people seem to be the other way around. They'd rather deal with abstractions and boilerplate instead of writing the actual code.