How Are You Using AI Tools Like Copilot to Grow Your SWE Career?

At my previous job at Adobe, we were all given GitHub Copilot licenses. Management strongly encouraged its use—sometimes even calling out engineers who weren’t actively using it. Adoption across the team was mixed: some engineers never touched it, while others seemed almost unable to code without it.

Personally, I found it helpful when writing brand new code or classes. But when editing existing code, or working on features that touched multiple parts of the repo (which was common for me), Copilot didn’t add much value. It often felt like more noise than signal in those cases.

I do believe AI tools have a place in every strong engineer’s toolkit, but I’m still trying to figure out what that place is for me. I’ve also heard stories of people becoming so dependent on tools like Copilot that they start to lose touch with core programming skills—which makes me wonder:

How do you think tools like Copilot can be used to improve your career, without hurting your long-term growth as a software engineer? Have you found ways to integrate it that genuinely elevate your work—or does it feel like a crutch?

Curious to hear how others are thinking about this.