Visual Studio provides some kind of AI even without Copilot.

Inline (single line) completions - I not always but regularly find quite useful

Repeated edits continuation - I haven’t seen them in a while, but have use them on maybe two or three occasions. I am very selective about these because they’re not deterministic like refractorings and quick actions, which I can be confident in correctness even when doing those across many files and lines. For example invert if changes many line indents; if an LLM does that change you can’t be sure it didn’t change any of those lines.

Multi-line completions/suggestions - I disabled those because it offsets/moves away the code and context I want to see around it, as well as noisy movement, for - in my limited experience - marginal if any use[fulness].

In my company we’re still in selective testing phase regarding customer agreements and then source code integration into AI providers. My team is not part of that yet. So I don’t have practical experience regarding any analysis, generating, or chat functionality with project context. I’m skeptical but somewhat interested.

I did do private projects, I guess one, a Nushell plugin in Rust, which is largely unfamiliar to me, and tried to make use of Copilot generating methods for me etc. It felt very messy and confusing. Generated code was often not correct or sound.

I use Phind and more recently more ChatGPT for research/search queries. I’m mindful of the type of queries I use and which provider or service I use. In general, I’m a friend of ref docs, which is the only definite source after all. I’m aware of and mindful of the environmental impact of indirectly costly free AI search/chat. Often, AI can have a quicker response to my questions than searching via search ending and on and in upstream docs. Especially when I am familiar with the tech, and can relatively quickly be reminded, or guide the AI when it responds bullshit or suboptimal or questionable stuff, or also relatively quickly disregard the entire AI when it doesn’t seem capable to respond to what I am looking for.