AI chatbots are sometimes quicker than using official library documentation. I daresay usually quicker, for anything but documentation that I know really well already.

I haven’t spent my own money on a development tool in a long time, but I find it worth a few of my employer’s dollars.

It’s hardly life-changing, but it’s convenient.

I can’t comment on it’s mistakes or hallucinations, because I am a godlike veteran programmer - I can exit Vim - and so I - so far - have immediately recognized when the AI is off track, and have been able to trivially guide it back toward the solution I’m looking for.

The chatbot version? Meh, sometimes, but I don’t use it often.

The IDE integrated autocompletion?

I’ll stab the MFer that tries to take that away.

So much time saved for things that used to just be the boring busywork parts of coding.

And while it doesn’t happen often, the times it preempts my own thinking for what to do next is magic feeling.

I often use the productivity hack of leaving a comment for what I’m doing next when I start my next day, and it’s very cool when I sit down to start work and see a completion that’s 80% there. Much faster to get back into the flow.

I will note that I use it in a mature codebase, so it matches my own style and conventions. I haven’t really used it in fresh projects.

Also AMAZING when working with popular APIs or libraries I’m adding in for the first time.

Edit: I should also note that I have over a decade of experience, so when it gets things wrong it’s fairly obvious and easily fixed. I can’t speak to how useful or harmful it would be as a junior dev. I will say that sometimes when it is wrong it’s because it is trying to follow a more standard form of a naming convention in my code vs an exception, and I have even ended up with some productive refractors prompted by its mistakes.

As someone who is just getting started in a new language (rust), it can be very helpful when trying to figure out why something doesn’t work, or maybe some tips I don’t know (even if gets confused sometimes).

However, for my regular languages and work, I imagine it would be a lot slower.

I’m pretty sure even if it was helpful they wouldn’t use it out of principle. Shit’s basically plagiarism laundering.

EDIT: Oh you’re talking about devs who use Lemmy, not the Lemmy devs.

I mostly use shell-gpt and ask it trivial questions. Saves me the time for switching to a browser. I have it always running in a tmux pane. As for code, I found it helpful for getting started when writing a functionality, but the actual engineering part should be done manually imo. As for spending money on it, depends on how you benifit from it. I spend about 50c on my openai API key, but I know a friend who used ollama (I think with some mistral derivative) locally on a gaming laptop with decent enough results.

It helps me write emails that are less nerdy.

ChatGPT will mock up a python script pretty quickly given a basic english description and reference materials like API docs, sparing me the burden of doing something tedius, but that’s about the extent of its utility for me.

I’m a new DM (and new to TTRPGs in general). I’m using bard and chatgpt to keep track of homebrew stuff.

I’m running an almost completely custom system, adapted to ASOIAF. Races (renamed to origins), classes, backgrounds, feats, etc. extra mechanics like duelling systems and large battle simulations, and faction interaction systems. It’s a lot, and I find it easier for me to have the bot spray solutions to whatever issue I run into, then grab the one that might work, and refine it until it might sound fun. I need to get a system in order to keep track of my campaign, though. Tried WorldAnvil and honestly, I don’t need that many tools. Might go back to Notion and keep track of all the factions and characters that way. Gonna be a lot of work though.