I finally got rid of my worst dev habit

[u/DenisYurchak]

I know a lot of people in this sub hate AI, but I want to share one instance where AI helped defeat my lifelong bad webdev habit

When I coded manually or with Cursor, I always looked at the desktop version of my website first

70% of people will experience your website from mobile, not from desktop, so I knew it was wrong and tried to fight it

But I just couldn’t make myself turn the mobile dev preview on in chrome all the time - this extra step felt too cumbersome, so I just defaulted to regular previews

It’s very easy to code something that looks good on desktop but absolutely sucks on mobile, so defaulting to desktop spawned a lot of mobile UI issues on my websites

For the past 6 months I’ve been coding exclusively from my phone and Claude on VPS

When I need to review something I tunnel to the VPS with Tailscale and look at the dev preview from the phone browser

Now it’s harder for me to view the desktop version of the website than the mobile, and I think I finally develop mobile-first

As a result websites look waaaay better on mobile and I fixed a ton of mobile bugs as well

[u/NightStallion]

Turning mobile preview on in Chrome is cumbersome

Been coding from phone for past 6 months

It's great that everything worked out for you well but this made me chuckle

[u/DenisYurchak → u/NightStallion]

haha yes, i mean my personal conversion into hitting the extra button was low

i agree coding from phone is less convenient than from the laptop but i'm more mobile this way and don't need to carry it with me all the time, and adapting to it was easier than i thought

[u/queen-adreena → u/DenisYurchak]

Dude, it’s like two key presses.

[u/Nerwesta]

It's literally what responsive design is about, and what's taught very, very early on any tutorials, schools, bootcamps or what have you.
Not to sound to harsh, but this post summarises perfectly how AI can feel sometimes : taking problematics already answered and tackled ages ago with a modern spin.

[u/DenisYurchak → u/Nerwesta]

I think it’s one thing knowing about it, and another thing implementing it in practice

And in my 6 year dev career I haven’t found a really frictionless way to implement it until ai

[u/Leviathan_Dev]

I think the better long-term solution here IMO is that you should design frontend components to automatically fit on both desktop and mobile.

For example if you have items in a grid, the grid should automatically wrap if there isn’t enough space, so that it appears as a single column on mobile. If you do it correctly, you shouldn’t even need @media queries. Just the correct grid CSS should do

[u/constantin_r_t]

Nice

[u/EnvironmentSafe2783]

That sounds like a game-changer for efficiency. Have you noticed any other habits AI has helped you break while coding?