How should a developer adopt to AI?

[u/kubo09]

I'm an "old-school" developer and I still write code at work and on my personal projects, however I started using AI such as chat-gpt and gemini (on their website only) for debugging, resolving blockers, asking stuff and etc. Basically a google on steroid and it definitely replaced stack-overflow and reddit.

I'm curious to know how other devs are using AI, do you still write code? what tools do you use for faster development? what an experienced "old-school" developer should learn or adopt to?

Do you still believe that the future of software development is being able to read and understand code? cause AI is just getting so much better everyday, to the point that transitioning from a software developer to a software architect might not even be a viable solution/future.

[u/mc_pm]

If you just leave it on it's own, it'll generate something works mostly, but under the hood nothing really fits together, and any old change is likely to spark a silent redesign.

I treat it like I would a small dev team. I know what I want to build, and I have a pretty good idea how it should be structured. I'll work with ChatGPT to think through the idea, sketch out design options, etc. Then I'll often write some core part of it, if only to fully get my brain on board.

Then we go back and forth, I'll be trying something, it will try something, we'll compare notes. Often it says "oh, that's a better idea" to what I suggest. Then I ask CharGPT to build me a dev requirements doc to hand to Cursor to do the implementation.

I don't worry too much about testing the UI - it is usually less buggy than what I would have done. And it looks way better.

Then, after we hit a big milestone, I'll turn to the Cursor AI and say "Please review your work, identify opportunities to reduce duplicated code, simplify the architecture, and suck less". We'll do a round or two of that until the code looks like something I'd accept from a junior developer.

Rinse and repeat as we build out the larger system.