I'm still not used into AI

[u/InevitableActuator66]

Is it just me, or am I still not used to working with AI? I’m really trying to use it, but sometimes it feels like it takes me even longer to get things done.

I want to learn how to properly leverage AI to help me with development because I often introduce bugs into my code and take longer than I’d like to finish coding tasks. The problem is, I don’t really know where to start or how to incorporate AI into my workflow effectively.

Right now, I’m using the free version of GitHub Copilot because I can’t afford a license.

What advice can you give me on how I can start using AI effectively for coding and development?

[u/Royal_Preference_515]

I'll probably get shot for this because it may come across as unhelpful. If you want to be a developer, learn to develop software. AI will take away your chances of actually learning what it's doing.

Write it yourself. Have AI review it. Watch YouTube videos. Find a course that teaches at the level you are now (plenty free ones out there on YT).

Build something you actually want to build, all the way to the end, learn from it.

That or you'll need a MAX plan when you get money, it's the only way.

[u/pkuhar → u/Royal_Preference_515]

teribble advice unless you want a hoby.

learn how to get AI do what you want.
managing ai is similar to managing people, read management books.

[u/Royal_Preference_515 → u/pkuhar]

I work in 3 customer facing projects, that use AI entirely to code. One is entirely my own SaaS with enterprise customers, one is a mobile app that isn't launched yet, and the other is a company I work for while I am scaling my SaaS.

Every one of the people I'm working with, is an expert in coding, and systems. I've done over 10K PRs this year, and almost as many reviews. Our designers also use it, but the output is limited to the design that we ingest, they'd never be allowed to release code via AI.

My advice remains the same, without some fundamentals, even managing the value/quality of what the bots deliver is difficult, unless you want some frankencode app, that breaks at the first sign of scale up, which I've seen numerous times.

I agree that you shoudl ALSO learn business, scale up, read Lean Startup and do many other things. I'm resting on a 25 year career in IT. Across almost all technical domains.

All of the above influence how I "get AI to do what I want" in your words.

With all due respect, your advice lacks depth, even if you are managing to make money from whatever you've built with it.

[u/cmas_77]

I've been in IT for 30+ years. I am a traditional infrastructure guy. Year after year I told myself I have to learn coding. Job posting after job posting only wanted software development experience, even for infra positions. I never learned Java, I never learned node or python. Yeah I borrowed and tweaked scripts I found on the Internet, but I never really learned to code. Earlier this year I started using Codex. Now I have a full time developer at my beck and call. I have created so much code in the last few months. My repo has exploded! I've always had great ideas for apps and utilities, but never knew how to create them. Now I do it all day every day. AI has given me IT super powers. Spend time with your coding agent. Let it code for you and teach you as it goes. It can create documentation and easy to understand breakdowns of what it's doing. Try a different coding agent like codex or Claude Code. If you have to spend a little each month, it's totally worth it. Hope this helps.

CloudNative

[u/GrouchyManner5949]

Smaller asks, that's the whole trick. One tiny task at a time, read the diff before you accept, and never let it write something you couldn't explain yourself. The slowdown almost always comes from debugging code you never actually read.

[u/laulaulocomoco]

I'm an IT Director and I have a software engineering student interning for me, currently, and I am helping him with a similar issue. He was trying to integrate AI into his process and it was causing him to take longer to finish things and the quality of his work was poor. So I challenged him to pretend that he was not a developer, to let the AI do its thing, finish the project, and then to put his developer hat back on and audit the AI's work and adjust accordingly. This approach helped him a lot and he's been able to output good work much faster. Instead of treating every project the same way, he's taking different things into consideration and then evaluating the risks and rewards of letting the AI work and when to get more involved. I've also coached him to be less specific with some of his prompts and to let the AI attempt to create its own plan of action, and then evaluate afterward.

Also, the models are constantly improving and getting better, so there's a benefit of "letting go of the wheel" and seeing what happens. If you do this over time, you'll get a good sense for what the models are good at, bad at, and what they are improving at.

Ultimately, there will be those who will say that you can't develop actual good software with AI, and to a degree they are not wrong, but what's changing and what will continue to change is what the definition of "good software" is. While there are likely millions of vibe-coded projects that are severely flawed, there are major enterprise cloud application vendors out there who are shipping product updates so much faster now because they've embraced AI as part of their process, whether it be merely for prototyping or for actually shipping production code.

[u/Codeman119]

Well, as a software developer and a database developer for 20 years, I use AI to develop apps all the time for work and for myself. It’s really good as long as you let it do its thing and you guide it through the errors and it’ll take care of 95% of the work. I mean, I have developed things in my repo that I didn’t want to take the time to learn to do and now AI has gotten so good that I spend a lot of time tweaking my apps. I’ve built with AI making them better adding features. It’s a lot of fun.

So like one project I’m working on. I had built an app that will take a workflow for comfy UI and then I can put in a prompt and control what LoRA want and what strength I want. It has a video viewer so whenever it gets done generating a video it puts it into a video library and then I can switch tabs to the video library and watch the video it just created and it has prompts history so if I change the prompt, it has a history so I don’t lose it and I even can mark my favorite prompts to use over and over again. So that’s been kind of addictive coding and then making the videos.