I have been working on finding out ways to make use of AI a net-positive in my professional life as opposed to yet another thing I have to work around and have cognitive load of. Some notes so far in getting great benefits out of it on couple projects -

* Getting good results from AI forced me to think through and think clearly - up front and even harder.

* AI almost forces me to structure and break down my thoughts into smaller more manageable chunks - which is a good thing. (You can't just throw a giant project at it - it gets really far off from what you want if you do that.)

* I have to make it a habit of reading what code it has added - so I understand it and point to it some improvements or rarely fixes (Claude)

* Everyone has what they think are uninteresting parts of a project that they have to put effort into to see the bigger project succeed - AI really helps with those mundane, cog in the wheel things - it not only speeds things up, personally it gives me more momentum/energy to work on the parts that I think are important.

* It's really bad at reusability - most humans will automatically know oh I have a function I wrote to do this thing in this project which I can use in that project. At some point they will turn that into a library. With AI that amount of context is a problem. I found that filling in for AI for this is just as much work and I best do that myself upfront before feeding it to AI - then I have a hope of getting it to understand the dependency structure and what does what.

* Domain specific knowledge - I deal with Google Cloud a lot and use Gemini for understanding what features exist in some GCP product and how I can use it to solve a problem - works amazingly well to save me time. At the least optioning the solution is a big part of work it makes easier.

* Your Git habits have to be top notch so you can untangle any mess AI creates - you reach a point where you have iterated over a feature addition using AI and it's a mess and you know it went off the rails after some point. If you just made one or two commits now you have to unwind everything and hope the good parts return or try to get AI to deal with it which can be risky.