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This is similar to "rubber duck programming" where you explain a programming issue to a toy and by saying it out loud or rephrasing it you see it from another angle and understand it/solve it.
The act of getting it outside of your own head is the key part.
Every time a tech bro innovates backwards into normality I feel like sir David Attenborough watching an orangutan invent carpentry
I tried vibe coding with Copilot once a few weeks ago (to prove a point how bad it is) and the error message led me to StackOverflow (niche case because of version of embedded XSLT in a business application) and then I was just back at my former MO of copy pasting SO code until it worked.
I have to say I've found the Copilot inline suggestions/predictions quite helpful for speeding up repetitive work, although they sometimes get in the way.
I've also found its ability to summarise a class in plain English quite helpful when working on projects I didn't create or haven't looked at for a long time.
However, I've recently been directed to try and port legacy code to modern languages but the same implementation as a rush job, and Copilot has not done well at that at all. It'll skip bits out because they're too complex, establish variables and parameters and never use them, or come up with ancient convoluted ways of addressing solved problems.
Copilot is only useful as a souped up Intellisense. It fails at anything more complex. Even free Deepseek does a better job. And even then I only use it as a reference if I don’t want to dive into documentation or can’t find the thing I’m looking for. Basically like pair programming with someone who doesn’t quite know the correct solution but can point you in the right direction.
I've had the same experience with locally running DeepSeek. It works pretty well as fancy auto complete, saves some time on repetitive code. But it also takes quite a while to spin up at times, and its suggestions are often either: nonsense, literally something I typed elsewhere on the page, or subtly wrong (missing something, adding extraneous variables, hallucinating functions, etc).
Asking it to write new code or build out an algorithm has been a mixed bag. Sometimes it knows enough to sketch out the barebones for me, but other times it gets hung up on some detail or the concept is "too large" and it just runs around in circles.
I find it quite funny how it will suggest the most inane comments though, it really is like having a troublesome junior dev around. Like if you left the cursor over a basic function like get-first-name(id) then it'll suggest comments like "// Gets the first name of the customer by ID from the database." Which... maybe it does that, I probably would have guessed that from the signature but its funny that it also would assume that. It makes my point for me that most comments are linter-appeasing trash.
I've found the Copilot inline suggestions/predictions quite helpful for speeding up repetitive work, although they sometimes get in the way.
At first, same, but at some point it started suggesting entire code blocks instead of finishing 1 simple line. Then it got in the way almost all the time.
I understand some of those terms!
The AI's are so fucking dumb.