Absolutely agree, and spellchecker is a great analogy.

I've recently been snoozing co-pilot for hours at a time in VS Code because it’s adding a ton of latency to my keystrokes. Instead, it turns out that `rust_analyzer` is actually all that I need. Go-to definition and hover-over give me exactly what the article describes: extra senses.

Rust is straightforward, but the tricky part may be figuring out what additional “senses” are helpful in each domain. In that way, it seems like adding value with AI comes full circle to being a software design problem.

ChatGPT and Claude are great as assistants for strategizing problems, but even the typeahead value seems to me negligible in a large enough project. My experience with them as "coding agents" is generally that they fail miserably or are regurgitating some existing code base on a well known problem. But they are great at helping config things and as teachers in (the Socratic sense) to help you get up-to-speed with some technical issue.

The heads-up display is the thesis for Tritium[1], going back to its founding. Lawyers' time and attention (like fighter pilots') is critical but they're still required in the cockpit. And there's some argument they always will be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44256765 ("an all-in-one drafting cockpit")