Programming

Unless you are only raw productivity focused, another "legitimate" reason for using AI could be that you have many ideas you want to test and doing it all by yourself is unfeasible. But then if you have tried AI for such tasks, the longer you work on the project with an LLM the more it drifts away from your original ideas. And usually it will come up with these magical reasons to justify the path it took which may take you half an hour to understand. And quite often such discussions will end up with something like "you are right, I have overstated the problem". So in the end if you want your own vision to be at the center of the project it becomes an annoying tug of war where either each couple days you have to spend a full day to understand why and how the LLM code has drifted from your original idea or just roll with the auto mode on.

For the latter you have to setup, as explained in the article, other agents to review, vet and improve the code which results in more drift so now the project drifts away from what you want even more rapidly. It will still try to achieve the same result, but it will no longer feel like your project because it is littered with technical decisions that makes the code feel very alien. In a sense you should be ok to be the project manager of your own hobby which frankly is soul destroying and really kills any joy I get from doing it.

So even if I use AI in personal projects, it is not to output more projects at a time but to see if the robot can come up with angles that are interesting or useful to solve problems I encounter (I will confess it can, quite often). If I ask it to write code it is a slow process, since as the code grows, I take time to completely go through the code and put it in a form that is easy for me to parse and then ask the robot to make sure it achieves the same result as the previous version.