There's a lot of talk lately about how much more productive AI is making programmers. It certainly is with me. But it seems like disability and accessibility have been left out of the discussion.
I've had to live with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome for almost 30 years. I had surgery in both hands and keep wrist braces on when I sleep. I use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard that's over 20 years old -- so old that it has PS/2-style connector and I'm using an equally-old USB adapter for it.
It doesn't impede my work most of the time. But repetitive tasks make my hands hurt. Mouse-clicking and key-pressing over and over cause aches that force me to take breaks and let my hands rest. I'm very good friends with Ibuprofen and cold packs to reduce the swelling.
I've developed techniques over the years to get more done by clicking/typing less. You could call it combating laziness if it wasn't so necessary. One of the reasons I'm so proficient with Regular Expressions is that they're very powerful for taking a list of text items and transforming it into repetitive source code. The same with Excel and the CONCAT() function.
But AI is better than all of them. I can give it a sample of my code, or describe what I want, and it'll spit out the boilerplate that I could write in my sleep, but caused my poor hands so much pain. I can tell it to perform a bulk update or conversion (say from JSON to YML) and it completes the task much faster than I can, usually more reliably.
It also excels at picking data out of one text format and converting it to another, something that took so much time and so much typing that it could become an excruciating task. Copying data out of an HTML file and putting it into a structured JSON or YML file is like magic.
You can't imagine how refreshing it is to be able to ask my AI coding assistant to do the monotonous work that used to aggravate my Carpal Tunnel. To me, this is probably one of the biggest advantages.