[aljgz]

I think people mix up "Improper/indecent/harmful/... uses of AI" with "Troubles made by AI". If we exclude my usage of Copilot in VsCode, my most common exposure to AI is one of my colleagues polluting every slack thread with a low effort, low quality content from ChatGPT that he's most probably not even read once.

But Copilot has revolutionized my coding. I have to code in many languages on a daily basis: Typescript, tsx, Css, Html, Dart, config files (like docker[compose], k8s, Ansible, json configs), c#, python. I'm only fluent in c# and ts. The fact that I do not need to remember the syntax for all the other is a big game changer. I was able to be immediately productive in a new language/framework after reading the documents. Previously it took some time before I ramped up, and then it would be lost after some inactivity. I'm not talking about important concepts, or CS fundamentals. I'm talking about specific ways things can be done in each language/framework. Copilot makes me 1000x more productive in this part. I'm still limited by my mental bandwidth, so I'm probably 2x more productive on an average day.

I also use ChatGPT, and run some models locally just to play with them, but all happen much less frequently than my colleague disrupting discussions with ChatGPT content.

[benterix]

I felt similar at the beginning but then I realized the suggestions were suboptimal, and it happened like 50% of the time. Usually not completely wrong, just imitating something that was already written, but sometimes introducing subtle bugs. So in the end it actually made me less productive because I had to stop my flow and start analyzing if there is no catch in the suggestion. It was a bit tiring and in the end I decided it's easier for me to stay with the flow.

I'll give it a try next year, maybe it improves to the point where the number of suboptimal suggestions falls to 20% or so, it would be much easier then.