I occasionally use Mistral — I see it to be one to be slightly closer on balance of things. It can be useful, when the cost of risk is minimal, or you need to have somewhere to start from. It helps me a lot with me being neurodivergent, because sometimes starting something feels impossible. Additionally, I use local models whenever possible just because most of the tasks I offload to AI do not require that much of thinking -- they are merely mechanical executions of actions, or I am just using it as a rubber duck. And local models are quite good at it (mistral and gpt-oss models are good, though sometimes you might need to tweak context window and have at least 16GiB of unified/GPU RAM to run it).

Still, my experience shows that using those tools clouds your own mind a lot. More so than just searching internet ideas, because mere googling just made you to forget facts. This tool makes you forget to think for yourself. It makes an immence discipline of mind in order to fight that, especially with all the buzz around "being on top of things". I think the same as other people in the thread: the train everyone forces to feel FOMO about is actually heading into the wrong direction, and we need to understand that.