Thanks! I skimmed this and have it in my reading list for later. I wonder how this pans out across disciplines other than software development. I would imagine there’s a huge diversity of skills out there that would affect how well people can craft prompts and interpret responses.

For my purposes I find it good for summarizing existing documents and categorizing information. It is also good at reformatting stuff I write for different comprehension levels. I never let it compose anything itself. If I use it to summarize web data, and I rarely do, I make it provide the URLs of all sources so I can double-check validity of the data.

I am also encouraged to use AI at work and also hate it. I agree with your points. I just had to learn to live with it. I’ve realized that I’m not going to make it go away. All I can do is recognize its limited strengths and significant weaknesses and only use it for limited tasks where it shines. I still avoid using it as much as possible. I also think “improved productivity” is a myth but fortunately that’s not a metric I have to worry about.

My rules for myself, in case they help:

• Use it as a tool only for appropriate tasks.
• Learn its strengths and use it for those things and nothing else. You have to keep thinking and exploring and researching for yourself. Don’t let it “think” for you. It’s easy to let it make you a lazy thinker.
• Quality check everything it gives you. It will often get things flat wrong and you will have to spend time correcting it.
• Take lots of deep breaths.

[Edit: punctuation]