I feel like I’m finally on the same page with my Microsoft executive overlords that have been hammering us to use AI everywhere, for everything including reducing toil, writing code, etc. etc.
I’ve used AI here and there for as long as it’s been available. I was an early adopter of the SWE agent on GitHub too, which was exciting. But I was still mostly on the fence about its potential and when using it was beneficial.
I really embraced it over the December break when I had several successful experiences (more or less in a row) of Copilot solving problems that I didn’t want to solve myself. They would have been cognitively tiring, even if the amount of code change was small.
This made me realize that AI isn’t all that limited for the ‘tough problems’ as I had previously thought.
Also, I used AI to generate a whole web store, with a js front end and an ASP.NET MVC back-end, complete with docker-compose.yml to make deployment and updates easy. It applied best practices for things I was unfamiliar with, and build things that looked better than I could ever do alone.
Then I started adding some MCP servers to support more workflows (e.g. msbuild.binlog investigations) and found copilot could solve tough build authoring problems, and faster than I could.
My personal economy was that “if I can do it as fast or almost as fast as I speculate AI could do it, I’d rather just do it myself because then I won’t lose my train of thought, take my hands off the wheel, whatever.”
Now my economy is “If it’s more than a few lines of code, or I don’t yet know what the change should be, let AI do it, investigate it, solve it, etc.”
I don’t want to ever investigate a build failure again. Let AI do it.
I don’t want to ever learn an old codebase again. I shouldn’t have to learn C++ or IDL or anything else. Why look at their code to understand enough to add one more function to the interface, when I can ask AI to do it?
AI is great at quickly learning from context and applying some intentioned change.
AI is great at looking at clues and solving problems. It just needs the tools, which is where MCP servers come in. You think AI can’t solve or automate X for you? Ask what tools it would need to automate for you, and see if those tools exist. Need to write an MCP server? That’s easy. In fact, AI can help you do it.
Most of the tasks we do, we do multiple times. And we do them because they aren’t (yet) automated. The cost to automating tasks has radically changed due to AI, and we’re not balanced any more. A whole slew of tasks that we do are now so cheap to automate through AI that we shouldn’t be doing them anymore, yet our own habits and beliefs have been holding us back.
Even if AI couldn’t do something faster than you, if it can do it, let it. Because while it’s churning away, you can be doing something else. I’ve had 2 or even 3 VS Code’s running side-by-side using AI to churn through tasks or investigations while I just act as the pilot. My brain can’t handle task switching 3 things in parallel too well, but if I’m just the conductor, I find it’s easy and fun.
And BTW, it gets orders of magnitude more useful when you add instruction files. If AI isn’t good at something, tell it how to do it better. Not just in one-offs prompts that you hand write, but check in an instruction file that copilot will find automatically so that in the future, you and others can just write the short “fix this” prompt and it’ll do the rest. And don’t stop once the instruction file is written. You can ask AI what it learned and tell it to update the instruction file for next time.
Case study: I had a bunch of recently merged PRs that did similar project migrations. These were very slow to produce and tedious to validate and fix the issues that would inevitably spring up either locally or in cloudbuild. So I told copilot to analyze those PRs and write an instructions file based on it. Then I had copilot do the next conversion. It took about 20 minutes, while I estimated it would have taken me 2-3 days.
So ya, I’m hooked. For the first time in a few years, I’m back in the “I can’t believe they pay me to do this” camp. 