The real "superpower" AI unblocked is ability to ask tons of stupid questions

For me, this is the perfect cure for impostor syndrome.

I felt being impostor in so many meetings - folks are discussing stacks and systems I've never touched myself, and I do not have any strong opinion because I lack context.

Wtf is kafka, is it different from any other MQ? What terraform exactly is? How to read through those fucking yamls? Can I add debug output into bazel rule, and what these rules actually are - executable code or some meta config, or both? How do we stream logs from k8s pods into central store to make it appear in grafana? Are they scraped like metrics or streamed realtime somehow? Does Go support "real" parallelism or just pretending to, like TS? Can I do both, and how?

Millions of small stupid questions which an experienced engineer is supposed to know, but in reality do not - just because I never had to touch kafka or kubes, or some systems that other teams have built.

AI unlocked the whole new level of understanding.

Sometimes I spend whole day just asking questions and digging into our internal systems, understanding how they are wired and why. I can ask it to search through slack and find the reasoning behind a decision mad a year ago. I can ask to connect to db and metrics store and pull data-based evidence. I iterate until I have full understanding, from the very basics.

As I reflect on it, I realize this is the real and most impactful change. Way more impactful than generating or reviewing code.