How I Work With AI
How I, as a Senior Developer, work with AI tooling.
AI, AI, AI, AI, AI.
It's everywhere. It's all people are talking about in almost every industry. It can be overwhelming sometimes to think about. Am I using it correctly? Am I using it too much? Can I be using it better or in more ways than I realize to help me out?
I want to write up quickly how I currently use AI and some tools to help me with my work flows, that allow me to still feel like I have control over what I'm doing and do the work that I actually enjoy.
Before the boom of AI tooling in the last couple years, we mostly just used Google and Stack Overflow to get our information, examples and so on when doing work. I think this allowed for the most flexibility because you could find various examples of code, figure out what you liked and use that as an example to build your implementation of things. Over time you find your own style and just go from there.
If you were too cool to use the internet as a resource for your development work, good for you, but this is about how I work and a lot of people do as well. Wasting time re-writing code that has been written a million times doesn't really make you any better than anyone else, it's just inefficient.
This is how I worked for a very long time, and for the most part I still do. However, now I have AI to help me instead of Google and Stack Overflow. This is how I feel like I have the most input into what I'm working on and can still feel like it's me doing the work. I can ask for options, recommendations, samples and so on, but decide whether or not I like that approach and then decide to implement. So it still is satisfying to get work done, and be involved in the process.
From there, AI then picks up on your style, which has begun to open doors for automatic workflows. I can ask the AI to build things based on how I have in the past, and it will just do it for me. It's things that I've already built, so it is my input and preferences, but the AI is doing the lifting of the copy-paste-adjust workflow and saving me time. Which is awesome, it lets me spend more time thinking about the bigger picture, or more technical issues.
These workflows are great, and really open the door to how we can work as developers.