AI has been a big boost for my data science productivity.

I can have an agent put together a shitty prototype of something just to get a general idea of what I'm looking at, and save probably half a day of work and avoid physically typing potentially hundreds of lines of code. And I can rubber duck with it, and very quickly search through software packages and literature, produce summary reports, dig through my own company source code and wiki and Slack messages to figure out how some specific detail works, etc. These things are important but take my time and energy away from focusing on the hard parts of what I'm supposed to be doing.

My new favorite thing with AI is that my pile of random helper functions is now a thoughtfully-designed library with an extensive test suite for every single thing. I'm not auditing every line of code but I'm reading the plans carefully and I do take a glance at what the agent wrote before I start using it. Most of the time it's not perfect or it's ugly in some way I wouldn't have done, but it's good enough to do research with, and it's way better than what I could have put together by hand, and in much less time. I trust my own research results more because I can put together these kinds of helper libraries much faster, and if I have to make changes I have a big test suite to catch me when I make a mistake.

The only hard part is managing the context switching where instead of putting my work on pause to go write a helper routine, I now have to account for periodically interrupting my work in order to keep an eye on what the agent is doing. For now my approach has been to just ignore it for a while and then take a break to cycle through AI work sessions/chats.

I agree, the speed at which the agents work is a problem. It creates an interrupt workflow instead of a flow workflow. This works for some people but I notice that I don't do well that way. Typically I'll have an agent working on a task while I use a separate one in Ask mode just kind of satisfying my curiosity while I wait. This keeps me engaged but makes the interrupts less jarring.