> You have the copilot mode which takes no learning at all which might give you some speedup, especially if you are doing repetitive stuff, it might even 10x+ you.

I have some grey hair and I've been programming since I was a kid. Using CoPilot autocompletion roughly doubles my productivity while cutting my code quality by 10%.

This happens because I can see issues in autocompleted code far faster than I can type, thanks to years of reading code and reviewing other people's code.

The 10% quality loss happens because my code is no longer lovingly hand-crafted single-author code. It effectively becomes a team project shared by me and the autocomplete. That 10% loss was inevitable as soon as I added another engineer, so it's usually a good tradeoff.

Based on observation, I think my productivity boost is usually high compared to other seniors I've paired with. I see a lot of people who gain maybe 40% from Copilot autocomplete.

But there is no world in which current AI is going to give me a 900% productivity boost when working in areas I know well.

I am also quite happy to ask Deep Research tools to look up the most popular Rust libraries for some feature, and to make me a pretty table of pros and cons to skim. It's usually only 90% accurate, but it cuts my research time.

I do know how to drive Claude Code, and I have gotten it to build a non-trivial web front-end and back-end that isn't complete garbage without writing more than a couple of dozen lines myself. This required the same skill set as working with an over-caffeinated intern with a lot of raw knowledge, but who has never written anything longer than 1,000 lines before. (Who is also a cheating cheater.) Maybe I would use it more if my job was to produce an endless succession of halfway decent 5,000-line prototypes that don't require any deep magic.

Auto-complete plus Deep Research is my sweet spot right now.