* People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper.
* People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are interested only in results, and are not interested in knowing more about the topic or honing their skills in the topic
The second group is one that thinks talking to a chatbot will replace senior developer
And this may be fine in certain cases.
I'm learning German and my listening comprehension is marginal. I took a practice test and one of the exercises was listening to 15-30 seconds of audio followed by questions. I did terribly, but it seemed like a good way to practice. I used Claude Code to create a small app to generate short audio (via ElevenLabs) dialogs and set of questions. I ran the results by my German teacher and he was impressed.
I'm aware of the limitations: Sometimes the audio isn't great (it tends to mess up phone numbers), it can only a small part of my work learning German, etc.
The key part: I could have coded it, but I have other more important projects. I don't care that I didn't learn about the code. What I care about is I'm improving my German.
Don't care about code quality; never seen the code. I care if the tools do the things I want them to do, and they verifiably do.
On the verification front, a few examples:
1. I built an app that generates listing images and whitebox photos for my products. Results there are verifiable for obvious reasons.
2. I use Claude Code to do inventory management - it has a bunch of scripts to pull the relevant data from Amazon then a set of instructions on how to project future sales and determine when I should reorder. It prints the data that it pulls from Amazon to the terminal, so that's verifiable. In terms of following the instructions on coming up with reorder dates, if it's way off, I'm going to know because I'm very familiar with the brands that I own. This is pretty standard manager/subordinate stuff - I put some trust in Claude to get it right, but I have enough context to know if the results are clearly bad. And if they're only off by a little, then the result is I incur some small financial penalty (either I reorder too late and temporarily stock out or I reorder too early and pay extra storage fees). But that's fine - I'm choosing to make that tradeoff as one always does when one hands off work.
3. I gave Claude Code a QuickBooks API key and use it to do my books. This one gets people horrified, but again, I have enough context to know if anything's clearly wrong, and if things are only slightly off then I will potentially pay a little too much in taxes. (Though to be fair it's also possible it screws up the other way, I underpay in taxes and in that case the likeliest outcome is I just saved money because audits are so rare.)