Imagine you are on the ground under your car and need a different tool. You ask for it and somebody hands it to you. That person is young and inexperienced. It is up to You to check if it’s the right tool, and if not pass it back (and in this example tell the person about the error and help them correct it).

And sure, You can always crawl out and get the tool yourself and sometimes that is the only option and in coding terms in my opinion best practice. But you can be faster with your helper. Use it appropriately and see how it affects your work. And that’s the point, your work. Don’t pass responsibility or thought off to AI.

I use it all the time as a kind of brainstorming tool.

“I want to do X (and details), can you tell me what tools or algorithms are available to me? List their pros and cons and give me some comparison”

Or on a somewhat recent project of mine, I has to effectively stub an entire library (but didn’t have to be done well), so I just told AI “take this page (the docs) and generate empty function stubs from it”. It doesn’t need to be high quality since it doesn’t run, it’s just to fool the dotnet engine.

I also tend to ask AI to add logging to some functions, since it’s annoying to do and impossible to mess up.