I'm a proud man, but I'm not such a fan of my own farts that I can't admit when I maybe should have listened to other people's advice earlier.

After having been convinced of the scope of impact of AI by someone I respect, I started playing with the Jetbrains AI tools. I am impressed at its ability to process my code and give actually helpful input and to consolidate documentation into a form that is concise and helpful.

I finally get what people mean when they say it saves time.

A couple things that truly warmed me up to it is, one:
I wanted to know if I could return a string, float array, whatever, from c++ to a python script. I was assured the answer was yes, but I just COULD NOT get it to work, so I gave up on it. I asked the question to the Jetbrains AI (4o in this case) and it gave me what I needed, and now I can return a string from c++ to python no problem. There are a lot of little questions like this that I gave up on that I now have to explore again, which is both exciting and annoying, because I already have a thousand hobbies.

And two:
I am working on an html email. It's a mess of tables and text and inline styles. Compared to the markup I'm used to writing, it's tedious to trudge through to make even simple changes. I was able to successfully instruct it to make a specific copy change, while respecting the document's indenting, all on the first try.

I will forever maintain that it will enable a generation of drones that don't understand how to do simple things and will atrophy the skills of otherwise capable people that use it as a crutch.

I will also always maintain that its foundation is built on mass theft and is a monument to the uneven application of intellectual property protection laws. But with DeepSeek coming out and having done the same thing to them, I find myself enjoying the turnabout. I'm also amused that I coincidentally jumped into the pool right as things got interesting.

All that said, as a reference tool, like Google and Wikipedia used to be, it's not the force of pure evil I held it as. It is actually very useful and if used responsibly on an individual level, can be an amazing productivity tool and can even teach its users new things.