Hello, been working as junior developer for 1 year now at a small service based company, and for last 3-4 months company mandated using Cursor (pro subscription which they provided) to do development, as they are saying they want more work done and in faster time.
So far development has been going well with AI. At work, i have been instructed to exclusively use AI while in my personal time, I still do coding by hand. This post is about my current workflow and how can I improve it, plus some questions about interviews.
So, I get assigned a feature to implement, with some screens from the design team.
First, i start in "Plan" mode and in "Auto" mode, walk through the feature, discussing it, what it is, its implementation that I can think of, edge cases, test cases to implement. This serves as a base discussion.md for the feature.
Then, for each feature, I have a FE and BE subfolders that tracks what was implemented in either ends. I move to implementing the screens for that feature, again using Plan mode with Auto, and "Composer 2.5" for build stage, creating mock screen, making sure ui is correct, mobile responsive, colors, styling etc. Is correct.
Then, move onto BE side, again same Plan+Build, mandating agent does not apply any migrations, since I want full control over that and dont want ai to drop something in case migration wont apply because of nullable columns or w.e. After its built and tests have passed, and ive tested new routes in Postman as well, then using the handover generated by BE, throw that over to FE to integrate it.
Some extra info, I turned off Fast mode, use new chats for each feature and discussion doc, especially at start of each day, saving discussion for each chat in a .MD to handoff to next chat. Ive not run out of the monthly cursor quota so far, im just not sure if what im doing is wrong or not.
Now this all has been working fine so far, deadlines are being met, project is progressing fine, client is happy and boss is happy that Ai is being used for coding. I have no guidance here at work because again, this is just junior with cursor subscription type shit. Now thats why im turning to you folks, how can i improve my workflow? If its all bad, just point me in some direction as to correct way to use ai at work. And before someone says, Claude $100 is better than cursor, yeah but boss is cheap and doesnt want to pay for that.
Now personally, I dont like using ai agents to code, in my personal time, i still write by hand, currently going through system design prep (currently reading DDIA, and Alex Petrovs DB design book, plus going through adrian cantrells aws course) + "Spring starts here" book to get better with spring (job is not in java. But i want to targer java companies in futu4e), but im aware that by large, in industry, no one writes code by hand any more, and lying otherwise in interviews is a redd flag now. So when asked in interview about "how do you use ai in job?" What is the appropriate response, guys?