Used Chat GPT today to help me figure out how to import .tiff and .shp files into civil 3D then create a shaded banding topo map for an Army Corps of Engineers permitting document. Would have probably never figured this out on my own. I don’t see AI as thinking for me, instead I’m learning new things I otherwise wouldn’t.
I refactored a library to build multiple versions of our component library using AI. What should have taken all afternoon was done in an hour. Simple, but time-consuming. That is AI aiding my productivity for sure. Now, if I could only get Storybook to stop releasing all these breaking changes; I would be most happy.
I am not as excited about it writing actual code, but using it for simple things is almost as useful.
We have a new AI based IDE that is mandatory but not mandatory. It has an AI buddy in it that has the personality of Clippy crossed with a golden retriever on 8 cups of coffee.
I asked it for help upgrading some dependencies to the latest versions and resolving breaking changes. It’s connected to our repo and supposed to be able to pull info on packages but instead of looking up the real latest versions of packages it iterated every single dependency to the nearest whole number. IE Spring Frame 7.0, Python 4.0, JDK 26. No matter how imaginary the release was. It cheerfully announced that it was finished and that the new branch will absolutely build and run perfectly. I pointed out how absolutely wrong it was and it complimented me on my astute observation and then created and ran a series of 8 bash scripts to try to undue its work instead of simply stashing the local changes.
It wasn’t helpful but it sure was entertaining.
