My on-again-off-again relationship with AI assistants

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Sean McPherson, whom I’ve been following ever since he introduced me to the Five-Room Dungeons concept, said:

There is a lot of smoke in the work-productivity AI space. I believe there is (probably) fire there somewhere. But I haven’t been able to find it.

I find AI assistants useful, just less so than other folks online. I’m glad to have them as an option but am still on the lookout for a reason to pay $20/month for a premium plan. If that all resonants and you have some suggestions, please reach out. I can be convinced!

I’m in a similar position to Sean. I enjoy Github Copilot, but not enough that I would pay for it out of my own pocket (like him, I get it for free, in my case because I’m associated with a few eligible open source projects). I’ve been experimenting with Cursor and getting occasionally good results, but again: I wouldn’t have paid for it myself (but my employer is willing to do so, even just for me to “see if it’s right for me”, which is nice).

I think this is all part of what I was complaining about yesterday, and what Sean describes as “a lot of smoke”. There’s so much hype around AI technologies that it takes real effort to see through it all to the actual use-cases that exist in there, somewhere. And that’s the effort required before you even begin to grapple with questions of cost, energy usage, copyright ethics and more. It’s a really complicated space!

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