Programming

I've been using phind as a technical-focused AI search engine, which is a great addition to my toolset.

I'm mindful of using it vs searching [ref docs etc], not only in the kind of search and answer I'm looking for but also energy consumption impact, but it's definitely very useful. I'm a senior dev though, and know what to expect and I am able to assess plausibility, and phind provides sources I can inspect too.

As for code assistance, I find it plausible that it can be useful, even if from my personal experience I'm skeptical.

I watched an Microsoft talk from two devs, which was technically sound and plausible in that it was not just marketing but they talked about their experience, including limits of AI, and where they had to and to what degree they had to deal with hallucinations and cleanup. They talked about where they see usefulness in AI. They were both senior, and able to assess plausibility, and do corrections where necessary. What I remember; they used it to bounce ideas back and forth, to do an implementation draft they then go over and complete, etc.

Microsoft can do the investment of AI setup, code sharing to model, AI instructions/meta-description setup investment, etc.

My personal experience was in using copilot for Rust code, for Nushell plugins. I'm not very familiar with Rust, and it was very confusing, and with a lot of hallucinations.

The PR descriptions CodeRabbit did were verbose and not useful for smaller PRs I made. That has been a while ago.

At work we have a voluntary work group exploring AI. The whole generate your whole app kind of thing seems plausible for UI prototypes. But nothing more. And for that it's probably expensive.

I'm not sure how much the whole thing does or can do for efficiency. Seems situational - in terms of environment, setup, capabilities, and kind of work and approach.