I think this is a pretty clear-eyed view. I've been a developer for 25 years. I use Copilot every day now exactly the way he describes. I get it to do XYZ, then use it to refactor what it just did or clean it up myself. Every now and then it goes sideways, but on the whole it saves me time and helps me focus on business problems more than ceremony.
If you can read code fast, it's very useful. I think this may be the biggest reason it's more helpful to seniors than juniors.
It's easy for a senior engineer to forget how exhausting it is for juniors to read code. I can glance at a page of code from Claude and tell pretty quickly if it's what I want. So it's useful to me if it's right more than half the time. For a junior this is definitely worse than just trying to write it themselves, they would learn more that way and come out less exhausted.
