builders

When to (not) use AI in software development

cyphercosmo

I leveraged AI significantly to accelerate me from minimal javascript/webdev experience, but with a decent programming background (mostly python), to contributing to stacker.news in just a few weeks.

Here was my experience:

### AI was good at:
- Understanding the intent behind different components of code. This is super helpful for someone who doesn't know javascript or basic coding patterns in web development.
- Explaining common coding patterns 
- Explaining different functions that are coming from external libraries like react.js, graphql, prisma, etc.
- Coming up with a function to accomplish a specific task with well defined inputs and outputs

### AI was bad at:
- Understanding the entire repo
- Orchestrating all of the above to actually figure out which files to modify and how in order to solve a task. 

So I really felt like my experience coding with AI was a collaborative experience, where I was like the "senior developer" in charge, but with a truly talented junior dev who was caught up on all the latest tech, but doesn't have a good understanding of the entire repo or the objectives.
