Like many tools, there is some user skill required. Certainly there are situations where AI assistants won’t help much, but if every single attempt you’ve made

Like many tools, there is some user skill required. Certainly there are situations where AI assistants won’t help much, but if every single attempt you’ve made to use an AI coding assistant has been “useless”, you are either working in a very niche area or, perhaps more likely, it is user error on your own part. There are plenty of people who are way too high on the current abilities of AI, but I find that the “AI is useless crowd” to be equally ridiculous. It reminds me of early in my career working in statistics where the company I joined out of grad school was justifiably looking to move out of SAS and start working in R and Python. Many were enthusiastic about the change and quickly saw the benefit, but there were some who were too entrenched in their previous way of working, and insisted that there was no benefit to changing, they could do anything required in SAS, and stubbornly refused to entertain the idea that there was a benefit to be gained by learning a new skill. You needn’t become an AI cultist. But with the number of people who are getting at least some benefit to using AI coding assistants, if you are finding it to be worthless in your personal experience, it may be worth stepping back and considering if there is something wrong with how you are trying to utilize it.