My work is requiring me to start using AI so I did an exploration this weekend.
I was blown away by how quickly I was able to get a working app. Full social media clone complete with persistence, video and audio playback, auth, realtime updates, and image uploads in about half an hour. I was then horrified by the quality of the code and how little I understood what the code was doing. I 10x’ed my speed, but in return debugging and editing was 100x harder and more time consuming.
I was also attempting to learn React Native and took note of how little debugging using the AI helped me actually learn the platform I was working with. I ended up abandoning the AI in favor of just learning directly.
I have used it once or twice because I am bad with any graphical projects. The absolute best way to use AI, imo, is like an enhanced version of Google. Breaking the problem down to the smallest parts to ask about. But even then I still hate using it.
The main use a friend of mine has gotten out of it is as a way to figure out what part of the language or library documentation to even look at to learn how to do a given task, instead of just trying to articulate the problem in a way that returns the right stackoverflow questions where someone mentions the language feature or class.