For the chat style AI, I have only found a few useful applications: looking up information in source languages I don't speak, programming assistant, and linux troubleshooting.

The biggest issue I have with AI in my personal use is that I have to be weary about hallucinations. with programming, this is often easy to fix with testing. knowledge search and troubleshooting have the biggest chance of being impacted by hallucination since I would have to verify each item myself which defeats the benefit. I especially found that any sort of technical search will result in entirely wrong results presented with confidence, so I usually limit queries to general knowledge type searches, and use the results as reference only.

As such, for me, I think that chat AI is a neat tool that has a few uses, some of which are better than older methods. It is not a magic bullet and it cannot be trusted without human judgement.

When I was working, it was in a field that was mostly insulated from the worst impacts of AI. But our manager and IT department seemed to think it was the future and were trying to find places to shove it. But because of the work we do nothing stuck. so in that way, it didn't really impact me too much in my professional work.

I think the biggest concern I have with chat style AI is deskilling myself. I worry that using it for programming has made me less able to read and write code. I try to use it collaboratively usually, so that I understand all the code, but I recently made a small program entirely with Deepseek without writing any code myself and it was a strange experience.

when it comes to non-chat style AI, I have dabbled in using some of the underlying algorithms to solve problems at work (gradient descent, evolutionary algorithms, etc.). But I've only used them to solve one off problems. I think that machine learning is a fascinating and highly useful field of research.