This has been my complaint about AI from the beginning, and it hasn't gotten better. In the time spend I figuring out how to explain to the AI what I need it to

This has been my complaint about AI from the beginning, and it hasn't gotten better. In the time spend I figuring out how to explain to the AI what I need it to do, I can just sit down and figure it out. AI, for me, has never been a useful assistant for writing code. Where AI has really improved my productivity is in acting like a colleague I can talk to. "I'm going to start working on X: how would you approach it? what should I know that isn't obvious from the beginning?" or "I am thinking about using Y approach for X problem but I don't see a lot of literature about it. Is there a reason it's not more common?". These "chats" only take 10-30 minutes and have already led me to learn a bunch of new things, and helps keep me moving on projects where in the past I'd have spent 2-3x as long working through ideas, searching for literature, and figuring things out. The combination of "every textbook and journal article in existence" with "more or less understands every topic in its training data" is incredibly powerful, especially for people who either didn't do a lot of formal school training or haven't had time to keep up with new developments. Beginners can benefit from this kind of interaction too, they'll just be talking about simpler topics (which the bot would do even better with) instead of esoterica.