Here are my 2¢ on using AI at work. I’m using Claude code and my typical tmux/neovim setup.
1. I use AI to find my way in a sprawling micro(service|frontend) system that I am new to. This helps cut down massively on the “I know what to do, I just can’t figure out where.” I started a new job where everyone has years of context as to how things fit together and I have none. I feel strongly that I need to give an honest effort at finding things on my own before asking for help, and AI certainly helps there.
2. Anything I stumble upon in a dev/deployment process that leans too heavily into the “good behavior/hygiene,” I try to automate immediately for myself and then clean up to share with the team. In the past, I might have tried to adopt the common practice, but now it’s less effort to simply automate it away.
3. There is value in using AI in the same manner as I use vim macros: I use the planning mode heavily and iterate like crazy until I’m satisfied with the flow. If the task has a lot of repetition, I typically do the first one myself then let the AI take a whack at one or two. If I don’t like the process, I update the plan. Once I see things going smoothly, I give the AI the ok to finish the rest (making atomic commits so that it’s not just one big ball of wax). This is pretty similar to how I record macros (make one change yourself, record the macro on the next line, test it out for a line or 2, re-record if necessary, test again, plow through the rest).
4. When I come across something that needs to be fixed/could be improved but isn’t related to my task at hand, I do a few minutes of research and planning with the AI, and instead of coding a solution, we create a todo document or an issue in a tracking system. This wasn’t happening before because of the context switching required to write good documentation for later. Now it’s more of the same thing but akin to a dry run of a script.
5. I can quickly generate clear and easy to read reports to allow other teammates to give me feedback on work in flight. Think about a doc with before and after screenshots of changes throughout an app produced by a playwright script and a report generator that I can rerun in under a minute whenever I want.
I’m finding that I really enjoy the skipping the tedious stuff, and I’m also writing higher quality stuff because I have more bandwidth. It helps me collaborate more with my non dev peers because it lowers the barrier to sharing.
Important to note that in my experimenting, I haven’t had great luck with winding it up and setting it loose on a task. Too often it felt like being a junior engineer again, doomed to throw spaghetti at the wall. Once I started using AI as an assistant, I felt things really started to click. Software development is about writing code, but it’s about a lot of other things too. It’s nice when the AI can help write code, but it’s fantastic when it helps you accomplish the other things.
>> I haven’t had great luck with winding it up and setting it loose on a task
Yeah there is real labor involved with trying to set up the right context and explain your goals and ensure it has the right tools, etc. etc. Sometimes the payoff is massive, other times it's like "I could have done this myself faster". It takes time to build an intuition for which is which, and I'm constantly having to tune that heuristic as new models and tools come out.
1. I use AI to find my way in a sprawling micro(service|frontend) system that I am new to. This helps cut down massively on the “I know what to do, I just can’t figure out where.” I started a new job where everyone has years of context as to how things fit together and I have none. I feel strongly that I need to give an honest effort at finding things on my own before asking for help, and AI certainly helps there.
2. Anything I stumble upon in a dev/deployment process that leans too heavily into the “good behavior/hygiene,” I try to automate immediately for myself and then clean up to share with the team. In the past, I might have tried to adopt the common practice, but now it’s less effort to simply automate it away.
3. There is value in using AI in the same manner as I use vim macros: I use the planning mode heavily and iterate like crazy until I’m satisfied with the flow. If the task has a lot of repetition, I typically do the first one myself then let the AI take a whack at one or two. If I don’t like the process, I update the plan. Once I see things going smoothly, I give the AI the ok to finish the rest (making atomic commits so that it’s not just one big ball of wax). This is pretty similar to how I record macros (make one change yourself, record the macro on the next line, test it out for a line or 2, re-record if necessary, test again, plow through the rest).
4. When I come across something that needs to be fixed/could be improved but isn’t related to my task at hand, I do a few minutes of research and planning with the AI, and instead of coding a solution, we create a todo document or an issue in a tracking system. This wasn’t happening before because of the context switching required to write good documentation for later. Now it’s more of the same thing but akin to a dry run of a script.
5. I can quickly generate clear and easy to read reports to allow other teammates to give me feedback on work in flight. Think about a doc with before and after screenshots of changes throughout an app produced by a playwright script and a report generator that I can rerun in under a minute whenever I want.
I’m finding that I really enjoy the skipping the tedious stuff, and I’m also writing higher quality stuff because I have more bandwidth. It helps me collaborate more with my non dev peers because it lowers the barrier to sharing.
Important to note that in my experimenting, I haven’t had great luck with winding it up and setting it loose on a task. Too often it felt like being a junior engineer again, doomed to throw spaghetti at the wall. Once I started using AI as an assistant, I felt things really started to click. Software development is about writing code, but it’s about a lot of other things too. It’s nice when the AI can help write code, but it’s fantastic when it helps you accomplish the other things.