Sometimes it is helpful to summarize large unfamiliar codebases relatively quickly, provide a high level overview, quickly understanding the layout and structure and help me locate the particular areas I’m interested in but I don’t really use it to write or modify code directly. It can be good at analyzing logs and datafiles to find problems or patterns or areas that need closer (human) investigation. Even the documentation it produces can sometimes be tolerably decent, at least in comparison to my own which is sometimes intolerably bad or missing completely.

But as far as generating code? I’ve found the autocomplete largely useless and random. As for chat, where I can direct it more carefully, it might be able to accurately provide a well-known algorithm for something but then will use a mess of variables and inputs that interact with that algorithm in the stupidest ways possible, the more code you ask it to generate the worse it gets, getting painfully overengineered in some aspects and horribly lacking in others. If it even compiles and runs at all. Even for relatively simple find this/replace it with this refactoring I find I cannot fully trust it and rely on the results, so I don’t. I’m proficient enough with regex and scripting that I don’t find it any faster to walk a generative AI to the result I want while analyzing the fuzzy logic it uses to get there than it is to just write a perfectly deterministic script to do it instead.

As a general rule, I find it is sometimes better at quickly communicating particular things to my manager or other developers than I am, but I am almost always better and quicker at communicating things to computers than it is. That is, after all, my job. Which I happen to think I’m pretty good at.

As for the environmental aspect, that’s why I don’t use it in my personal life basically at all if I can avoid it. Only at work, and only because they judge my usage of it as part of my performance. I would be just as happy not using it at all for anything. And when I do use it for personal use, which is a point I haven’t really reached except for a bit of experimentation and learning, I am never willingly going to use a datacenter-hosted model/service/subscription, I will run it on my own hardware where I pay the bills so I am at least aware of the consequences and in control of the choices it’s making.