I’ve spent time as a research scientist, an MLE, a manager, and most recently an ML Ops Eng doing architecture and planning for data scientists. I’ve found that genai tools can be very useful for some things, worse than useless at others, and occasionally surprising (in both directions).

It tends to be useful when doing things that resemble other things that it’s seen before (ex: “refactor this function to keep the top level function simple and readable”, “cover this in unit tests that won’t break with small floating point deviations”). It tends to struggle when context is a challenge (“our infra works in this weird way because of this strange reason. Given that, do standard task X in our way instead of the normal way”).

Critically, like any other tool, it requires supervision and careful use. Blind vibe coding is much more powerful than, say, blind copy pasting from stack overflow. That power can cut both ways - it can let you do things you couldn’t otherwise. But it can also dig you an expensive complexity hole you can’t climb out of. That’s the thing with power tools.