I worked as an electrician in the military, albeit for aircraft. I do miss getting my hands dirty in that regard; however, the civilian side aircraft electrician pay is not remotely comparable to my SE salary (in fact it'd be a more than 50% pay cut). Is residential/commercial electrician pay closer to SE pay?
Yeah, my in-laws rent went up nearly 40% and the property management claimed it was due to upgrades (the upgrade was a new coat of paint on the building). That took them out of the range of being able to afford their apartment and other necessities with social security and a meager retirement. They had to move to a new place in a bad area and my MIL had to start working again.
I was using Github Copilot, however I just ended my subscription because I wasn't using it enough despite being elbow deep in code every day. Most of the time the integrations that I use (JetBrains Rider and VS Code) wouldn't function correctly or I'd constantly be logged out. When the integrations _were_ working, the suggestions would be decent but occasionally when doing something like converting jquery to vanilla javascript I'd end up spending more time debugging the result of the suggestion than if I had just done the conversion myself.
Otherwise, I use ChatGPT to help me write tickets/user stories for work as well as for generating test cases for my QA engineers to follow.