The best ways I've found to use AI are explaining concepts to me that I can easily grok but just am not familiar with, to do simple tasks that I can audit, and as a search engine.

When I want to engage with AI in a conversational manner, I've found it's imperative that I come with enough knowledge to be able to counter the AI. I regularly find that it gets simple things wrong, and so I need some understanding of the topic to push back. For instance, the other day I wanted to understand "parse, don't validate" for the upteenth time. Given my knowledge of programming it was very easy for me to push back and eventually I realized this was something I had been referring to as "translation at the edge" and that parsing includes validation, but only by reading between the AI's lines.

And this becomes even more important when I want it to actually do something I'm going to use. I don't "vibe-code". I did once, which resulted in this tool to help my mom make crochet patterns, but at the point it's at now, with the AI as it was then, it couldn't make more changes without breaking existing functionality. Luckily it works well enough. But nowadays, I have it work on small things that I will stitch together. And being knowledgeable about what it puts together is key so that I can make sure it works and fix it when it's broken, which is is a lot. If I had a dollar for every time an AI confidently told me something I knew was incorrect I'd have covered all my out-of-pocket costs of using AI and more.

When I venture outside of my depth, it's these qualities that make me treat it as a search engine. AI can cite it's sources these days and I've found going to the primary sources to validate what the AI said is key. So many times it will give you invalid links and you'll have to push back or discount everything they've said.

These aren't the only use cases I use AI for, but they are the one's I use regularly. The key I've found to successful interaction is recognizing that AI is not intelligent, it is an nondeterministic language pattern recognition and extension engine. And you can use it as such. It can be helpful as an editor for your thoughts, but even there you have to be careful that it doesn't consumer your style or voice and give it that bland AI voice that we're seeing everywhere these days.

Ultimately, I've found my usage of AI is much lower these days than when it came out. I think it's given me a renewed appreciation for deep knowledge and the learning process. AI has, and almost certainly will have its place, but it is nowhere near the hype levels it's at now or has been.