ML Engineer here. For coding, I mostly use Cursor/Claude Code as a fast pair. I'll detail what I want at a high level, let it draft, then I incrementally make changes.

Where I've automated more aggressively is everywhere around the code. My main challenge was running experiments repeatedly across different systems and keeping track of the various models I ran and their metrics, etc. I started using Skyportal.ai as an ops-side agent. For me, it's mostly: take the training code I just iterated on, automatically install and configure the system with the right ML stack, run experiments via prompt, and see my model metrics from there.