Kiley

Congrats!!

Layers!

AI coding tools help me understand code that’s outside my area of expertise. Some of our codebase is written in Hack. I mostly write TypeScript. So I sometimes ask AI to explain a Hack file and help guide me to the little part I need to change, then make sure I made the change correctly.

AI coding tools help me refine and improve the my rough drafts of code. I’ll sometimes write a function or component, then spend a little time back-and-forth with AI improving it, covering edge cases, checking for optimization opportunities, drafting unit tests that would be worth writing.

AI coding tools help me by writing the boilerplate for well-known code patterns. When I need to create yet another X, or yet another Y, it’s faster for me to give Cursor a few example files then ask it to create a new X or Y for me, with comments for me to fill in with the actual business logic.

AI coding tools help me find things faster. Yesterday I used Cursor “Ask” mode to help me find a list of files/functions related to a particular domain. Much better than keyword search. Found some files that would not have been found using keywords alone.

A few observations of how I’ve used AI coding tools recently, as an experienced engineer, and I do some of these things almost “all the time”

(About me: 12 years writing software professionally, currently work at a big tech company as a Sr. Software Engineer)

I’ll add that a shift is occurring where LLMs are used less to make up a plausible sounding answer, and more to decide which tools to call to get a proper answer. They can be quite capable middlemen who take in a question, call a tool to find the answer, then share what they found

I love both video and posts, for different reasons. Video is how I learn best, but being able to share a link to a specific part of a post is a bit better than linking someone to a video. Reading a post is more one-size-fits-all; watching a video is more of an ideal fit for some, but not everyone

I felt behind, too! I decided I should go ahead and learn RSC—how it works, the mental model, try it out. May be a bit like the adoption of React w/TypeScript. At first pretty rare, but now much more common, though still not 100%. I imagine RSC might follow a similar timeline and outcome.

I'd like to engage with lots of friendly, open-minded web developers and builders-of-things on here. Would welcome you to reply with an account or two!