[SkyBelow]

I had some .csproj files that only worked with msbuild/vsbuild that I wanted to make compatible with dotnet. Copilot does a pretty good job of updating these and identifying the ones more likely to break (say web projects compared to plain dlls). It isn't a simple fire and forget, but it did make it possible without me needing to do as much research into what was changing.

Is that a net benefit? Without AI, if I really wanted to do that conversion, I would have had to become much more familiar with the inner workings of csproj files. That is a benefit I've lost, but it would've also taken longer to do so, so much time I might not have decided to do the conversion. My job doesn't really have a need for someone that deeply specialized in csproj, and it isn't a particular interest of mine, so letting AI handle it while being able to answer a few questions to sate my curiosity seemed a great compromise.

A second example, it works great as a better option to a rubber duck. I noticed some messy programming where, basically, OOP had been abandoned in favor of one massive class doing far too much work. I needed to break it down, and talking with AI about it helped come up with some design patterns that worked well. AI wasn't good enough to do the refactoring in one go, but it helped talk through the pros and cons of a few design pattern and was able to create test examples so I could get a feel for what it would look like when done. Also, when I finished, I had AI review it and it caught a few typos that weren't compile errors before I even got to the point of testing it.

None of these were things AI could do on their own, and definitely aren't areas I would have just blindly trusted some vibe coded output, but overall it was productivity increase well worth the $20 or so cost.

(Now, one may argue that is the subsidized cost, and the unsubsidized cost would not have been worthwhile. To that, I can only say I'm not versed enough on the costs to be sure, but the argument does seem like a possibility.)