I've found that AI has saved me time consulting Stack Overflow. It combines thorough knowledge of the documentation with a lot of practical experience gleaned from online forums

It has also saved time producing well-defined functions, for very specific tasks. But you have to know how to work with it, going through several increasingly complex iterations, until you get what you want.

Producing full applications still seems a pipedream at this stage.

>Producing full applications still seems a pipedream at this stage.

Do you mean like: "write me an app that does XYZ?"

Well, it's a pipedream because you probably couldn't even get a room of developers to agree on how to do it. There are a million ways.

But this isn't really how programmers are expecting to use AI, are they?

That's kinda still how I get the most out of it - search, more or less. Claude gives me great starting points from which I can do some refining/confirming searches and documentation lookups. _Starting_ with search feels like a drag now. But the information and code I get is unreliable at least 20 % (just a guess, frankly, did no statistics) of the time, so I treat the output as things to try or investigate, rather than things to ship.

You'll probably get a few responses from folks that happily tab complete their software and don't sweat the details. Some get away with that, I'm generally not in a position where it's OK to not fully understand the system I'm building. There's a lot of stuff that's better to find out during development than in a late night production system debugging session.