There's a tremendous amount of hype and hate around AI these days. Most techies seem to be on the hype side and most normies are on the hate side. Everybody has "good enough" reasons for their takes on this. Nobody is obviously wrong. I don't think the technology is far enough along that we can say it is clearly a net negative, like cryptocurrency has turned out to be, but the concerns that it could go that way are reasonable and we should not leave the risk abatement to the tech industry that has shown so little concern for its effects on our society.
Since I'm expected to be on the hype side of this equation I felt I should frame this as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly without too much emphasis on The Good. There's plenty of content out there talking about how great AI is for coding and various art forms. That is not my goal here. Looking at where I've gone wrong and where others have run into difficulties seems much more valuable. If I've run into these problems in my first 8 months of earnestly using AI, then I'm sure many other folks have bounced off of these same issues.
The Good
Overall I'm pretty happy with my AI experiences. I've been able to complete a few projects that I'd been working on for years. I've gotten a few new projects to a useful state. One way that you can see how AI has changed my level of productivity is my graph of github contributions:
