I'm a structural biologist at a mid-sized biotech. I use AI tools daily. They make accomplishing the same things I was able to accomplish before quite a lot faster and easier. They don't help me magically accomplish new things that I couldn't previously.

For example, it helps me install academic software, debug things. It helps me take a large dataset and write scripts to ask questions. It helps me go through experiment drafts to see if I'm missing things. It helps me remember obscure formulas I use every 6 months. It has not, at least in my experience, come up with anything truly novel.

A concrete example: AlphaFold is great...to come up with a starting model for a chimeric fusion or something. What would have taken me 1-2 hours fumbling around in PDB or CIF files is now a quick prompt.

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iririririr 2 hours ago | parent [-]

do you feel this is the same trade off of UI builders like android studio (or msvb6). you do in minutes what you previously did in 2, 3 hours.

is it all the work? no, but it's a part that's early on and have high perceived impact.

then, as you progress, that tool actually gets in the way and a new feature that would take 2 hours, now is around 2 days.

	▲	colingauvin 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In some ways, but it's tough to say if that's my ADHD or not. It's far too easy to leave one branch of reasoning now and jump to another whenever progress gets difficult. Though in some areas where I can sustain interest, AI is helping me go deeper. For instance, I've been putting myself to sleep at night by just asking it questions about expectation maximization and Bayesian statistics. This has seriously boosted my understanding of cryo-EM alignment algorithms in a way I couldn't do in grad school because there was no professor that understood enough to help me when I got stuck reading literature. So it's a double edged sword for sure.