Same experience here, probably in a slightly different way of work (PhD student). Was extremely skeptical of LLMs, Claude Code has completely transformed the way I work.
It doesn't take away the requirements of _curation_ - that remains firmly in my camp (partially what a PhD is supposed to teach you! to be precise and reflective about why you are doing X, what do you hope to show with Y, etc -- breakdown every single step, explain those steps to someone else -- this is a tremendous soft skill, and it's even more important now because these agents do not have persistent world models / immediately forget the goal of a sequence of interactions, even with clever compaction).
If I'm on my game with precise communication, I can use CC to organize computation in a way which has never been possible before.
It's not easier than programming (if you care about quality!), but it is different, and it comes with different idioms.
It doesn't take away the requirements of _curation_ - that remains firmly in my camp (partially what a PhD is supposed to teach you! to be precise and reflective about why you are doing X, what do you hope to show with Y, etc -- breakdown every single step, explain those steps to someone else -- this is a tremendous soft skill, and it's even more important now because these agents do not have persistent world models / immediately forget the goal of a sequence of interactions, even with clever compaction).
If I'm on my game with precise communication, I can use CC to organize computation in a way which has never been possible before.
It's not easier than programming (if you care about quality!), but it is different, and it comes with different idioms.