AI 01: Intro for Laymen
AI: Intro For Laymen
Why AI For SWE
AI is to devs what Electric Bicycles are to cyclists: it helps everyone from total beginners to elite devs.
AI however, is like riding a wild horse: you must learn to tame it, to control its insane power otherwise it'll create garbage.
Great gains in both quality and quantity/productivity.
Impacts your entire software product development lifecycle
Use Cases on Real-Life Projects
Discover
Explore codebase and history
Search documentation
Onboard & learn
Design
Plan project
Develop tech specs
Define architecture
Implement/Build
Implement code
Write and execute tests
Create commits and PRs
Deploy
Automate CI/CD
Configure environments
Manage deployments
Support & Scale
Debug errors
Large-scale refactor
Monitor usage & performance
What I Have Experienced In
I used AI for almost all of the above points and subpoints, except for "4. Deploy" and "5. Support & Scale".
However, I will very soon have experience in all points. If not already by the time you read this.
Use Cases in Software Dev Education
Using and mastering CLI tools such as git, docker, bq.
AI IDEs and CLIs
Most Popular:
Claude Code by Anthropic (CLI)
Claude Code in VS Studio by Anthropic (IDE)
Cursor (IDE)
Claude Code by Anthropic is definitely the leader in the space. Every competitor copies them and/or follow the open standards they establish.
Underdogs:
Codex by OpenAI (IDE)
Antigravity by Google (IDE)
Github Copilot by MS (IDE)
Antigravity and Codex are more recent ones, less established and potentially more buggy.
Github Copilot is not recent but lags in terms of UX and features.
AI and Privacy
Login from an anon email
If you have a subscription paid by bank card, they have your full name and other details - keep that in mind
When copy/pasting info to an online LLM:
Remove your full name from the path in the shell
Remove your company details
Remove your client details
Learn How To Use AI - With AI
What I call Meta Questions.
Stop reading articles, googling and all that nonsense. If anything, your AI will know itself better than anyone else.
So ask it questions about itself. How to use it. Why it answered this way. Could your last prompt be improved. And so on.
Learn How To Learn - With AI
Ask AI to create a quiz with 10 questions for a level you think appropriate i.e. beginner
To be executed sequentially and:
the answer of each question only shown after the user answer
the user has to answer each time before the next one is asked
Glossary
Reasoning → text shown by the AI when thinking.
Close The Loop = Close The Feedback Loop = Code Quality Check = Code Quality Gate = Gate
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