I appreciate you voicing your feelings here. My previous employer requested we try AI tooling for productivity purposes, and I was finding myself in similar scenarios to what you mention. The parts that would have benefitted from a productivity gain weren’t seeing any improvement, while the areas that saw a speedup weren’t terribly mission-critical.

The one thing I really appreciated though was the AI’s ability to do a “fuzzy” search in occasional moments of need. Or, for example, sometimes the colloquial term for a feature didn’t match naming conventions in source code. The AI could find associations in commit messages and review information to save me time rummaging through git-blame. Like I said though, that sort of problem wasn’t necessarily a bottleneck and could often be solved much more cheaply by asking around coworker on Slack.