> until you've learned to use it
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.
You have cmdk mode which you need to prompt and seems to he a lobotomized version of chat. I find putting comments and waiting for the copilot mode to kick in better as then the way we got there is saved.
Then there is agentic editing chat: that is the timewaster you speak off I believe, but what is there to learn? Sometimes it generates a metric ton of code, including in legacy massive code bases, that help, and often it just cannot do whatever.
I don't think these cases you make, or at least, when the second one goes beyond the basics, are different. There is nothing to learn except that you need read all the code, decide what you want in tech detail and ask that of the agentic chat. Anything else fails beyond the basics and 'learning to use it' will be that but if you didn't know that after 5 minutes you definitely didn't do any 'fine tuned pycharm ide', ever.
It is a tool that customizes code it ingested for your case specifically, if it can. That is it. If it never saw a case, it won't solve it, no matter what you 'learn to use'. And I am fine doing that in public: we use LLMs a lot and I can give you very simple cases that, besides (and often even that doesn't work) typing up the exact code, it will never fix with the current models. It just gets stuck doing meaningless changes with confidence.
> 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.
I get very good results with very little effort, but that is because I have written code for 40 years fulltime. Not because I know the tool better.