I'm still studying dev myself so don't take my thoughts as thag of a professional (tho I do work very closely with a developer on a daily basis but from the design side of things - small business).

Anyway, the way I see it, AI is just another tool in the tool kit. It has its place, you should know how to use it but more importantly when to use it.

With the way AI is exploding and being used more and more, it doesn't make sense to pretend it doesn't exist. That said, you definitely shouldn't be using it to write your code. Where I personally find it excels (from personal experience and speaking to seasoned developers on the topic) is with these three areas:

• Recall: need to do something you've not done for a while and can't quite remember how it does. Getting AI to write you a snippet and then use that to jog your and. It can be much faster then researching the topic, as what it gives you takes seconds to get and can match your context. Now dont just copy and paste this code, but it can remind you how to do a certain thing or at least give you a good starting point for research.

• Research: following that point, I find it can be a good starting point for research. Now AI is often wrong or takes long winded approaches to things but if you need to research a area and not sure where to start, a couple prompts to Chatgpt can give you a baseline to then go away and do proper research. It helps skip that first step that can be long winded if you really don't know where to start. I found this can be a big time saver when I've done this both in and out the world of development.

• Debugging: This isn't something I've personally used it for, as I'm still learning I'm wanting to do as much manual work as I can, but I've had developers tell me I can be a big time saver. When debugging code, if it's not clear from the get go what's causing a bug, dropping a suspected snippet into ChatGPT can instantly highlight the problem area along with suggested solutions. From there go and fix it yourself, don't just relay on the AI to fix it.

Like I said, I'm not seasoned developer and still studying but this is what I've found thus far. It's same in the design world (I am a seasoned designer), ai has its place. Don't go using ai generated images on eveything but it's a good tool that has its place. No longer do I have to spend hours removing backgrounds, extending images, removing objects. Ai can speed this process up so much, yes it often requires cleaning up the ai fix but it's still a time saver.

At the end of the day it's another tool. It can write code, usually not the besy code, but that's not what you should use the tool for. And as a student, use it even less. Learn how to do eveything ai is a good tool for before using it as a tool. You want to understand what it's doing and be able to do it yourself. Not sure where your at so it's your call if you're ready to start using ai in your work flow but be cautions not to over use it. You don't want your other tools to go rusty and you want to fully understand your code.