Yes because I can’t program.

I ask it to construct small blocks like if or for loop statements with a very verbose prompt so that all variables are properly named and the code block is small enough I can debug myself.

Basically is like building lego where the AI prints every piece.

1. It’s much more time consuming than if I knew the language myself but it’s actually a fun way to learn and it’s faster than wading through forums for n amount of time.
2. I don’t get paid to do it, so I don’t see it as problematic, my biggest gripe is I used to cite the stack overflow, etc, user where I got the snippet of code before and now I can’t give credit to the original author.
3. It’s useful since it has allowed me to automate a lot of tedious tasks that would otherwise be more time consuming, making the activation energy necessary to create the automation much lower.
4. I use mistral exclusively, the GPT 4, 4o and 5 are quite useless in comparison. The latest mistral and codestral tower above them in my anecdotal experience, at least the way I use it.
5. It works well with local models so I don’t have to feed the beast.
6. I’m an illiterate idiot when it comes to python so it has resulted in someone being able to do something they otherwise couldn’t.
7. I’m not a programmer, AI hasn’t made me a programmer, If I were a programmer, the code completion is so slow I’d probably not use it, I’m unaware of other uses other than debugging, but even for its own code, debugging is hit or miss, miss, miss because of limited context, it really can’t debug well.
8. It’s definitely not worth how many trillions are being poured into it. Especially when one uses it more and becomes painfully aware of the limitations, it becomes quite obvious that the applications lie in increasing industrial and scientific productivity rather than creating a mass market tool.
9. Agentic AIs are pure cancer and a security catastrophe waiting to happen. The ease with which one can use prompt injection to exfiltrate basically any kind of data the agent has access to is probably keeping many a cyber security experts awake at night. I envision, ironically, black hat being invaded by “prompt engineers” specialized in creating injection prompts.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

I mostly use it as a code search tool, when dealing with large projects that I’m not very familiar with. Like I can ask “where is this component actually inserted into the web page” and it can sometimes point to a file and function. It doesn’t always work of course, but when it does it can save a lot of time.

I don’t ever let AI write code for me though

I have used AI to give me the syntax and function names I need, then researched those functions and found better ones instead.

I once asked AI to show me how to do something and it gave me a 20 line script. After 2 hours working with it, I finally got it to work. Another 30 minutes of optimizing and got it down to 3 lines. A bit more research and I discovered that what I wanted was actually a language feature, and I just needed to call a single function with a single argument.

AI occasionally saves me time, and usually causes a significant time waste.

Never used it, never will

I don’t use AI when I’m learning a new system, framework or language because I won’t actually learn it.

I don’t use AI when I need to make a small change on a system I know well, because I can make it just as fast and have better insight into how it all works.

I don’t use AI when I’m developing a new system because I want to understand how it works and writing the code helps me refine my ideas.

I don’t use AI when I’m working on something with security or copyright concerns.

Basically, the only time I use AI is when I’m making a quick throw away script in a language I’m not fluent in.

I tried to use AI to help me code, it only gave me trash.

I use continue in VSCode hooked to ollama or mistrial. Sometimes I just ask a chat to “make a script/config that does <my MVP of the project, maybe even less>”.

How much I use depends on how little I am invested. My rule is I try to correct a bad output ONCE. I cannot argue it into fucking getting it right.

I prefer net new code and add this feature. Ironically good refactoring goes a long way. The less it has to adjust the better, and less I have to review the better.

I use Copilot with mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5. Don’t use the autocomplete because it’s useless and annoying. I mostly chat with it, give it specific instructions for how to implement small changes, carefully review its code, make it fix anything I don’t like, then have it write test scripts with curl calling APIs and other methods to exercise the system in a staging environment and output data so I can manually verify it and make sure all of its changes are working as expected in case I overlooked something in the automated tests.

As far as environmental impact, training is where most of the impact occurs, and inference, RAG, querying vector databases, etc. is fairly minimal AFAIK.

https://mtg-arena-deck-builder.web.app/ I used 100% Claude for this (im not a programmier)

I mostly dislike using AI to code. The one exception I recently got into was when I was fighting with a python script and didn’t understand why it was behaving the way it did. I used AI for possible causes and pretty quickly managed to fix it. Sometimes it’s just nice to have some possible causes for a bug listed so you can check them out

The only code generation assistance I use is in the form of compilers. For fun I tried to use the free version of Chatgpt to replicate an algorithm I recently designed and after about half-hr I could only get it to produce the same trivial algorithms you find on blog posts even with feeding it much more sophisticated approaches.

No

I use AI as a rubber duck, to compliment the rubber ducks on my desk when they don’t give enough feedback. So it’s use is mostly conceptual, I find that models that provide “thinking” output perhaps more useful than whatever its actual answer is because it asks questions about edge cases I might not have considered.

As for code generation, I hate it. It outputs garbage, forgets things, hallucinates, and whatever thing it writes I’ll have to rewrite anyway to actually make it compile.

As I’m fairly isolated at work I think it makes a good pair programmer partner, so to speak. Offering suggestions that I can take into consideration and research heavily if I think it’s a good one.

No; I don’t use AI at all for programming currently.

Not a programmer but when I need a more complicated powershell script for something I ask copilot first and then I fix whatever it shits out so that it actually works how I want. It usually saves me some time…