How to use AI without using AI

I know what you're thinking. Weird title. Whatever can he mean by that?

I think that, whether we like it or not, most of us now accept that AI can be useful in the right circumstances. Getting AI to do things in place of a human is generally bad or at least risky. Letting a human do things AI can do well in a fraction of the time also doesn't make a lot of sense. Getting the right balance of man and machine is the winning formula.

There are ways of using AI to help without letting it loose, keeping the human in control at all times.

Coding

Some people love vibe coding, letting the AI go for it, moving fast and breaking things; others see the flaws of this and avoid it like the plague. This doesn't have to be so binary.

You can use AI in your coding work without letting it write a single line of code. You can just use it to explain existing code to you, as an alternative to asking a busy team member. Or you can ask it why something might have been written the way it is. It will explain things and give feedback to help your understanding.

Once your work is done you can get it to write documentation, a readme.md or something more complex with all the bells and whistles like data diagrams.

AI is also excellent at finding things. If you've got a complex site or app with layers of CSS and components it's sometimes hard to work out where a particular style is set. It can do this for you.

It's incredibly good at diagnosing bugs. It will save you lots of time in finding what's wrong so that you can focus on the best fix, maybe even buying you time to make some improvements while you're there.

Writing

You can use it to help with your writing without letting the AI actually do any writing.

I've recently written my first book and I used AI in this capacity. I wrote everything myself but used AI as my virtual editor. I asked it for feedback, asked it to point out anything that didnt use plain English, asked it to find repetition of phrases in close proximity, find typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, things that use the passive voice, inconsistencies in tone, etc. At no point does it do the writing - it's just your critical friend. A bit too critical at times.

tl;dr

You can work with AI using it as a researcher / editor / advisor / dogsbody and still do the work yourself.