I often have to refresh my memory about things which I am already familiar with (or in a broad sense) but need to look up specifics as and when needed and AI has been quite helpful. I don’t take its word for anything but it’s more a case of “ah yes I remember now”. So for me it cuts down a lot of hunting around and piecing things back together. It’s insane really, how good it already is..

I use ChatGPT for help with writing things, like speeches and presentations. I make an outline document for context, attach that to my GPT session and make a solid prompt.

I just started using Cursor for making Rails features and it’s pretty slick. I started with just the chat mode and it was nice to get some solid recommendations on creating styles. I’m mainly a backend developer so asking the agent (using Claude v4) things has actually helped increase my front end knowledge. I’ve moved over to agent mode now that I’m more comfortable and I can get certain features done in much less time. It’s not perfect but it’s like coding with a robot friend.

Still a lot to learn in this space but I’m starting to see some of the productivity benefits for sure.

I currently use AI for things like summarizing text or videos, generating or improving text, asking general questions, and handling some terminal-related tasks.

I’m still hesitant to rely on it for complex programming or data manipulation, though. In its current state, there’s a noticeable margin of error, which makes me cautious. If it can confidently give wrong answers to simple questions, how can I trust it with something more critical? That’s why I think everything it produces should be double-checked, and sometimes that review effort ends up canceling out the time it was supposed to save.

That said, I feel like at some point I’ll have to fully embrace AI-assisted software development just to stay competitive in this job market.