How We're Using AI in Our Work These Days (Practical Notes)

We've been integrating AI tools at the team level since last year, and I've gathered only the ones that actually worked. About half of what we adopted just because it was trendy has been scrapped.

1. Code review assistance

Run it yourself before opening a PR and preemptively fix the issues that would get flagged. You can really feel how much reviewer time it saves.

2. Document drafts

Design docs or meeting summaries. But you can't just use them as-is; terminology consistency has to be done by hand.

3. Log analysis

Paste in error logs and get a "list of likely causes in order of probability." I make the final call.

4. Generating test cases

For getting ideas for edge cases.

5. Internal search chatbot (RAG)

The more documentation a team has, the bigger the effect. But if you don't set a cadence for ingesting the latest docs, it can actually lose people's trust.

Overall: It's not a silver bullet; it's strong for repetitive, draft-type work. If you use it as-is where judgment is required, it causes problems.