I'm a senior engineer with 20 years of experience and mostly find all of the AI bs for the last couple of years to be occasionally helpful for general stuff but absolutely incompetent when I need help mildly complicated tasks.
I did have a eureka moment the other day with deepseek and a very obscure bug I was trying to tackle. One api query was having a very weird, unrelated side effect. I loaded up cursor with a very extensive prompt and it actually figured out the call path I hadn't been able to track down.
Today, I had a very simple task that eventually only took me half an hour to manually track. But I started with cursor using very similar context as the first example. It just kept repeatedly dreaming up non-existent files in the PR and making suggestions to fix code that doesn't exist.
So what's the worth to my company of my very expensive time? Should I spend 10,20,50 percent of my time trying to get answers from a chatbot, or should I just use my 20 years of experience to get the job done?
I did have a eureka moment the other day with deepseek and a very obscure bug I was trying to tackle. One api query was having a very weird, unrelated side effect. I loaded up cursor with a very extensive prompt and it actually figured out the call path I hadn't been able to track down.
Today, I had a very simple task that eventually only took me half an hour to manually track. But I started with cursor using very similar context as the first example. It just kept repeatedly dreaming up non-existent files in the PR and making suggestions to fix code that doesn't exist.
So what's the worth to my company of my very expensive time? Should I spend 10,20,50 percent of my time trying to get answers from a chatbot, or should I just use my 20 years of experience to get the job done?