For asking quick questions that would normally send me to a search engine, it’s pretty helpful. It’s also decent (most of the time) and throwing together some regex.

For throw away code, I might let the agent do some stuff. For example, we needed to test timing on DNS name resolution on a large number of systems to try and track down if that was causing our intermittent failures. I let an agent write that and was able to get results faster than if I did it myself, and I ultimately didn’t have to care about the how… I just needed something to show to the network team to prove it was their problem.

For larger projects that need to plugin to the legacy code base, which I’ll need to maintain for years, I still prefer to do things myself, using AI here and there as previously mentioned to help with little things. It can also help finding bugs more quickly (no more spending hours looking for a comma).

I had an agent refactor something I was making for a larger project. It did it, and it worked, but it didn’t write it in a way that made sense to my brain. I think others on my team would have also had trouble supporting it too. It took something relatively simple and added so many layers to it that it was hard to keep all the context in my head to make simple edits or explain to someone else how it worked. I might borrow some of the ideas it had, but will ultimately write my own solution that I think will be easier for other people to read and maintain.

Borrowing some of these ideas and doing it myself also allows me to continue to learn and grow, so I have more tools in my tool belt. With the DNS thing that was totally vibe coded, there were some new things in there I hadn’t done before. While the code made sense when I skimmed through it, I didn’t learn anything from that effort. I couldn’t do anything it did again without asking AI to do it again. Long-term, I think this would be a problem.

Other people on my team have been using AI to write their docs. This has been awful. Usually they don’t write anything at all, but at least then I know they didn’t writing anything. The AI docs are simply wrong, 100% hallucinations. I have to waste time checking the doc against the code to figure that out and then go to the person that did it to make them fix it. Sometimes no doc is better than a bad doc.