There is AI as a useful tool, maybe, which is at most few % of current hype. Most folks seem to end up babysitting it a lot to get something useful out of it. And then there is everything else which is mostly hype or narrow use cases. To proper typical senior managing a team I don't see much added value. It can help juniors churn out large chunks of the code but I haven't worked in 20 years in a place that values quantity of code and quick deliveries over quality.
Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used even as I write it now, all popular sites are blocked and there are strict policies against. Couldn't care less, coding is such a small part of my work I don't want to lose this creative outlet by delegating it to something I need to triple check for bugs afterwards. Also with any new stuff I learn way more by implementing it myself rather than looking at pre-made code.
This is a huge thing tbh. I don't like these AI things in general so I wouldn't use them anyway, but I just can't imagine going to my clients and asking them, "Hey is it okay with you if I routinely upload all your code to these random American venture-backed start-ups?". And I really can't imagine just doing that behind their back. I couldn't really imagine doing that with an employer's code either.
Ideally I don't even use software where accidentally toggling the wrong checkbox in some settings screen results in automatically uploading client code to these American start-ups either. Now I won't pretend that my stance against AI is purely out of some principled cybersecurity concern, but it's definitely a factor.
In any case, what I see most people doing is integrating it with Claude/Copilot/etc. The security concerns specifically obviously don't apply when running it locally.
AI also isn't shoved in your face when using Zed, there's one small button on the button right.
But all that annoying madness is distracting from how amazingly awesomely useful this stuff is. It's wild how many little quick projects I can kick out in a couple hours! Ideas just come out of my head with so much less fuss; when I don't like it I ask for something different.
My point is less to convince though about AI. I appreciate your starting sentiment here, but I really don't get the follow up?
> genuinely happy it works for you. I just don't want AI in my text editor, even if you're happy with it.
I don't see why it would bother you at all? There's a tiny little button in the status bar and a few scattered menu items that feel, to me, very easy to ignore.
It feels like someone being mad that their spreadsheet has I dunno, logarithms in it, but the person hates logarithms? It feels weird to opt in to caring against. I have a generalll abnner of thought which is "your anti-feature is not a feature", and this feels like one of those situations: i don't see why someone would cling to an editor not having a feature they don't use?