[atleastoptimal]

Depends on what your goal is.

Every few months LLM's get markedly better. In days GPT-5 will come out which by early reports (and anecdotal evidence on LMarena) is substantively better than the best current coding models. Will it surpass humans? It is a possibility, unless there is some yet unforeseen impassable intelligence gap below human intelligence and above SOTA AI intelligence.

Coding as a hobby seems to be more fun for people without AI tools. You get the experience of more completely holding the system in your head, your interaction with the codebase is more intuitive and connected deeply to your natural reasoning faculties. However, I believe the purism of eschewing AI tools is a trap that had few consequences in 2023, or even 2024, but by the end of 2025, the standard for what a "productive software developer" can accomplish in a week will be set by the boon AI tools give to mid and senior developers.

That's it, there's no getting around the reality of technological progress. Soon after that, there will be few if any humans in the loop at all for all except the highest level executive decisions. Coding will be an artisan task done for personal enjoyment, like knitting or cooking.