What I actually use AI for as an engineer (and what I don't)

The conversation about AI and engineering tends to live at two extremes: it is going to replace all of us, or it is a stochastic parrot that cannot be trusted with anything. The truth, at least in my week, is duller and more useful than either.

Here is what it actually does for me, and what I keep it away from.

Where it earns its place#

Scaffolding the boring 80%. The bit of a feature that is obvious but tedious, the form, the wiring, the fifth CRUD endpoint that looks like the other four. I know exactly what I want; typing it out is just tax. That is a good trade.

Rubber-ducking out loud. Half the value is being forced to explain the problem clearly enough to ask. Often I answer my own question mid-sentence. The model is a very patient duck that occasionally says something useful.

Boring transforms. Reshape this data, convert this config, write the regex I will forget in a week. Low stakes, easy to check, genuinely faster.

Getting unstuck. Not the answer, the direction. “What are three ways people usually approach this?” gets me moving again when I have been staring at the same file for too long.

Where I keep it well away#

Anything security-critical I cannot verify. It will write you an auth check that looks perfect and is subtly wrong. Confident and wrong is the exact failure mode you cannot afford there, so those decisions stay mine.

Facts I would be embarrassed to get wrong. If I cannot check it, I do not publish it. The model does not know the difference between remembering and guessing, and it will not warn you which one it just did.

Architecture I do not understand yet. Letting it design a system I could not have designed myself means I now maintain code I do not understand. That debt comes due, usually at the worst time.

The rule I keep coming back to: never let it make a decision you could not check.

The honest bit#

It has genuinely made me faster. It has also, once or twice, made me lazy in a way I had to catch, accepting a plausible answer because checking it was more effort than I felt like. That is on me, not the tool.

It is a power tool, not a colleague. Extremely good in the hands of someone who already knows what “done” looks like, and quietly dangerous in the hands of someone who does not. I try to stay the first kind.