I use AI tools to help me program despite them being mostly very disappointing. They save me some typing once in a while.
At least, now that I have switched from Perplexity to Cursor, I can ask my questions in my editor directly without having to open a browser search tab. I pass through a lot of different technologies in a given workday, so I have a lot of questions to ask.
For my use cases, it’s rare that Cursor can do even a halfway decent code change even in domains where there is a bunch of prior art (“convert this file from using alpine.js to htmx”). I know people who say they have generated thousands of LoC using LLMs that they actively use but there the old adage comes in: “We can generate as much code as you want, if only all the code is allowed to be shit.”
The position below is one of the more charitable positions of how AI can help a programmer and even that I don’t think is particularly convincing.