Not Sure About AI Tooling Yet
I’ve been pounding the AI pavement all week. Still not sure if it’s actually made me faster. Maybe I’m just forgetting how long it used to take—rose-colored memory syndrome. We all do it. You think you were lightning fast back in the day, but forget about the hours lost to weird edge cases and dead-end Stack Overflow posts.
That said, AI has been helpful when I get stuck. The kind of stuck where you’re deep in docs or debugging something that should be trivial but absolutely isn’t. It’s great at pulling you out of the ditch when your brain’s out of gas.
Prompting the Prompter
Lately, I’ve been trying to guide it more. Writing little documents to steer the output, breaking things into smaller chunks. The funny part? I use AI to help write those documents too. So it’s this weird recursive workflow, talking to the same assistant in different tones, trying to coax better results out of it. Prompt the prompt writer. Maybe one day it’ll figure that out on its own.
One of the big issues, though, is the same one I’ve always had with code: doing too much at once. AI just amplifies that. It’ll write twenty files in five minutes, and yeah, I can review it quickly… but ten minutes later? I’ve already forgotten what half the functions were doing. And heaven help you if you “vibe code” your way through it and just assume it did a good job.
Breaking things into smaller, testable pieces helps. I’m starting to treat AI like an offshore dev shop—one of those rent-a-coder setups where you’re not working with the A or B team. You don’t hand them a massive project. You hand them a very tight spec for a very small component and then you test it the second it hits staging.
Still Sharpening the Blade
I make decent progress. But then I have to go back and clean up the AI’s mess. It’s like reviewing a junior dev’s PR. I find myself muttering, “Why? Why would you do it that way?” It’s not that it writes bad code. It’s just deeply unopinionated. Generic. And that last 10% where I bring the design back in line? That takes 80% of the time.
Still grinding. Putting in reps with the AI tooling, hoping for a breakthrough, or at least a clear “aha” moment. I don’t know if that moment’s coming, but I do think the use case will reveal itself eventually. The process will settle in. Some way to harness this thing without spending half the day cleaning up after it. If I keep sharpening the blade, the edge will show.
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