Since may 2025, I’ve done several projects and used the Gemini AI assistant. Here are a few observations:
An AI assistant is far cheaper than a human assistant $20/month vs $$$$
An AI assistant is like a fresh college grad who understands (but mis-applies) Architecture and programming, has read the whole Internet, and their most complicated programming project was a shopping cart or web site.
I did several projects (still ongoing):
Converting an existing application to a spring boot and Thymeleaf web application using Eclipse and maven.
A new java based Chrome extension
Updating several projects to jUnit 5 and more modern syntax.
Gemini was very helpful with converting projects to Maven, updating to a more recent version of Spring and java, sorting out some basic database issues and tracking down a few bugs.
It literally waste horrible and a huge waste of time on:
Complicated bugs and any debugging that was more than trivial
Sorting out package dependencies
Losing track of the current focus/context
Twice it had me chasing down the inability to add a certain version of a dependency to the project, insisting it was a network problem. I tried using curl, disconnected my laptop from the wifi and used the wifi from my phone hotspot instead, etc. Wasted 2 days. Turns out it was trying to add a version of the dependency that didn’t exist anymore. Once I manually added the correct version to my pom.xml everything was fine.
Losing context/focus – more than a few times, it would reply with a solution to a problem we had solved days ago, totally ignoring the problem I had asked about and provided debugging/logging information and often a stack trace.
More than a few times it would suggest a piece-meal solution to a piece of a problem, failing to get the ‘big picture’ and suggest a more general approach.