They are useful. My teams are seeing modest productivity gains by self reporting, but I’m going to give it another six months to see if it shows up in actual metrics.

I’m enthusiastic about AI but I remain skeptical. I don’t mean to always be contrarian but I’m dead in the middle and everyone who says they are great or terrible I tend to offer my experiences in the other direction.

They are not to be trusted to handle customers directly, but they can assist experts when they have to step out of their expertise. For example I can’t write Python, but I’ve been coding for 30 years. I can certainly write some good directions on what needs to be done and I can review code and correct it. So AI has let me write a bunch of complex Python scripts to automate minor parts of my job to let me focus on the hard parts.

For example I can execute GDPR delete requests in a few moments where doing it by hand with Hoppscotch or Postman probably takes me 5-10 minutes. We have a multiple systems and sometimes I have to delete multiple profiles for a given request.

It’s great at rubber ducking as long as you think critically about its proposed solutions. It’s fine at code review before sending it to an actual person for review. It flags non-issues but it also flags a few actionable fixes.

The important thing though is to never trust it when it comes to anything you don’t know about. It’s right a fair amount of the time, depending on what you ask, but it’s wrong enough that you should never, ever rely on it being right about something. The moment you put your life in its hands, it’ll kill you with nothing to say to the survivors but, “Your right about that. Sorry, that was my mistake.” And it isn’t even sincere. Because it can’t be. Because it doesn’t think or feel anything.