thanks for the detailed reply. the proof is in the end product - as long as it is used with an appropriate understanding of its output, anything can be useful.

obviously I can’t say for sure how many AI emails I have gotten, but I can say that I’ve gotten some that are obviously AI where I skip over it because of that. it’s just excessively wordy and if somebody couldn’t have been bothered to be concise, I can’t be bothered to read it - I very much ascribe to the belief that somebody should not have to put in extra effort because the person requesting something didn’t. but if you have it working for you, then great. I do think that that is a good use case if it is dialed in — if it’s got the right style and verbosity, it’s much easier to just review something and tweak it than it is to write it all out from scratch.

I have found it helpful as a search engine when I don’t know the exact terms that I need to be searching for, but that’s about it. It’s just the initial search, and then once I know where I’m going I can use regular means to get the rest, because it really breaks down once you start asking it very specific stuff in my experience (engineering stuff). but again, I haven’t really needed to use it too many times.

One other time that I did find it helpful was when I didn’t know a particular API function call, and I just could not figure it out from the documentation or what I knew of the API. it got me the function I needed (although did not at all understand how to actually use it lol, but that was fine because I just needed to get there and then use the documentation for the rest).

I have a demo for an AI tool soon that is supposed to automatically create engineered parts drawings. I am very skeptical, but we’ll see how it goes. my expectation at this time is that it will only be good for very basic parts, not even moderate complexity, which means it’s functionally useless for me. if it’s turning out drawings at the quality level of a junior designer, that doesn’t help me — I need those juniors to turn those out so they can improve and do the same on the moderate complexity stuff. if they don’t have the opportunity on the simple stuff, then they won’t improve to handle the more difficult stuff that the tool cannot. and those simple drawings can be churned out in a minute each, often, so the time savings are just not there on that type of part.