I think there's room for a mixture of both use-cases. I think personally programming is far more like being a mixture of a pilot and an engineer. There are times, like in this article where it's far more useful to have a HUD, while i'm focused, i'd much rather have a better eye on things that are interesting to me. I often find things like cursor do the opposite - they slow down your processing time, you shift into an environment that often feels like i'm correcting a junior engineers work rather than expanding my knowledge of the codebase.

For example, if i'm working on authentication logic, i'd much rather see a smart heads up display, you look at a function and get advice on where this might mess other things up in the codebase, edge cases, etc. A smarter form of current IDES that doesn't mean you click through 50 different files to work out that this third party package doesn't work on specific code. A HUD in this case is ideal.

But I find there's a more detailed, slower development, I still really often use the chat function on claude mixed with Obsidian to hold bits of information i've found useful, this is more related to getting a deeper understanding of certain concepts. As a stupid developer, I often find I might need something explained 20 times in 20 different ways, and actually a predictive text model is perfect in so many circumstances to explain a massive algorithm step by step. It's ideal for things like shader code, where I might come back to it 6 months later and want to work out what was in my head at the time, a historic chat is perfect for those things.

There's definitely a balance to be struck, I think now that the hype cycle is peaking we can hopefully seperate the profit seeking AI tools from the useful day to day knowledge expansion. Currently it feels like the discovery of perspective in the reneissance - instead of using it to further advancements, we're attempting to sell perspective courses to people.