[gherkinnn]

No stigma. If it helps, use it. Don't discard a useful tool but know its limits. You are not paid to carry around trivia to be used in a vacuum. You are paid to solve problems that sometimes involve programming.

It serves me well for micro-programming. So problems between a single line of code and a function. Here I can control for all its weirdness and hallucinations. As soon as I need to compose these elements I found it somewhere between neutral and a nuisance. High-level changes across a domain or further are impossible.

Understanding problems inside-out or from first principles has been vastly more helpful than blindly copying around libraries/SO answers/Copilot ideas.

That said, I have been in this industry for over a decade, am jaded and bitter and up to my armpits in Stockholm Syndrome, and have learned how to keep computers happy. Starting out I would have loved Copilot and it would have absolutely made a huge difference.