One mode I felt was missed was "thought partner", especially while debugging (aka rubber ducking).
We had an issue recently with a task queue seemingly randomly stalling. We were able to arrive at the root cause much more quickly than we would have because of a back-and-forth brainstorming session with Claude, which involved describing the issue we were seeing, pasting in code from library to ask questions, asking it to write some code to add some missing telemetry, and then probing it for ideas on what might be going wrong. An issue that may have taken days to debug took about an hour to identify.
Think of it as rubber ducking with a very strong generalist engineer who knows about basically any technical concepts.
You may want to try any of the tools that can write to the filesystem so you're at least not copy pasting code from a chat window. CoPilot, Cursor, Aider, Tabnine, etc.
We had an issue recently with a task queue seemingly randomly stalling. We were able to arrive at the root cause much more quickly than we would have because of a back-and-forth brainstorming session with Claude, which involved describing the issue we were seeing, pasting in code from library to ask questions, asking it to write some code to add some missing telemetry, and then probing it for ideas on what might be going wrong. An issue that may have taken days to debug took about an hour to identify.
Think of it as rubber ducking with a very strong generalist engineer who knows about basically any technical concepts.