I’m already coding at my company, so when I do a side project, it’s mostly for my enjoyment and needs. I enjoy coding in my spare time because it either solves an issue I have or lets me be creative, like with this website. What would be the benefits for me to delegate something I enjoy doing?

There is also an ecological consciousness that prevents me from going all out on AI. I know the impact it has on the environment, but also on the people who live near data centers or those far away who still suffer from its global warming effects. See the article. Voir l'article. I’m actually planning to build a home server to host an Ollama instance for my personal needs.

I tend to avoid delegating everything to AI. I try to use it when I cannot do without it or if it would take me x10 longer to get the information I need.

Here are the use cases:

• It would take me 10 web searches to find the information I need.
  • As devs, one of our most valuable skills is searching the internet. When I know my request is going to take me multiple web searches that will lead to more, it’s faster, easier, and more ecological to ask an AI.
• My issue is very niche and specific to the task/project.
  • Going deeper and deeper into the same project, you sometimes find edge cases driven by weird library interactions that are very difficult to debug.
• Helping when stuck, while I’m learning a new technology
  • Example: For this website, I’m using Tailwind v4.2. I haven’t used Tailwind since v2 and wasn’t familiar with many of its new features.
• I cannot find something in a tool's documentation.
  • Example: Following the above example, I was always trying to work with Tailwind’s documentation. But sometimes I couldn't find the specific class I needed.
• Brainstorming or idea dumping on a subject I’m new to.
  • Example: I’m currently looking into Self-Hosting. I’m trying to get away from big cloud companies for my storage, photos, passwords, but also code/website hosting, and maybe AI. Since I’m completely new to Self-Hosting, I brainstormed with Gemini Chat to guide me on hardware, software, and security recommendations.
• Spellchecking
  • Spellchecking has been around for many years and is not very resource-demanding.
• Translations
  • When writing and building in different languages, I sometimes need to translate large amounts of text.

Also, I try to keep an AI chat per project, so it always knows the context of my request, which helps me reduce the number of tokens I send.