I'm just shy of 30 years experience. I think I've spent more time learning how to use these tools than any other technology I've learned, and I still don't know the best way to use them.

They certainly weren't a time-saver right away but they became one after some time giving them a real shot. I tested their + my limits on small projects, working out how to get them to do the whole project, figuring out when they stop working and why, figuring out which technology they work best with, figuring out the right size problems to give them, figuring out how to recognize if I'm asking them something they can't do well a ask something different instead, guide them into creating code that they can't actually continue to be successful with.

I started last December in Cursor's agentic mode and have been in Claude Code ever since probably March or April. It's definitely been a huge boost all year for side projects - but only in the last couple months have I been having success in a large codebase.

Even with all this experience I don't know that I would really be able to get much value out of the chat interface for them. They need to be proposing changes I can just hit accept or reject on (this is how both Claude Code and Cursor work btw - you don't have to allow it to write to any file you don't want or execute any command you don't want).