Companies now require you to use AI. They want to move fast. You spend most of your day working and if you can’t hand code, make mistakes, and learn where you work, how do you get better?
A few weeks ago someone asked Marco Arment the same question. Marco didn’t have an answer. I don’t have an answer either, but I can show you how to make lemonade. I don’t claim I can help you become successful, but I think I can help you not die.
Yeah, use AI to write code, whatever, since that’s what your boss wants you to do. But try to understand what it writes. Make it justify everything. Do not let it ship a single line of code you don’t understand. Why are you touching this file? I thought adding an if statement here was enough. What are the trade-offs? Make that sucker explain until its context window is full.
There’s one thing AI is a lot better at than humans: patience. It won’t laugh at your stupid questions. So ask questions. These are the questions your seniors don’t have time to answer. Why do I have to run Core Data on the main thread? What is thread-safe? What are threads? Why is MVC called MVC when the Controller is in the middle? Is this Zhenyi guy legit and why should I trust him?
Last time around we had Google. Now you have AI. And Google didn’t work well if you didn’t use the right keywords. Good luck figuring out what a race condition is if you don’t even know the word. Now you tell the AI, “Sometimes the toolbar appears, but sometimes it doesn’t.” The AI will be like, ah! Race condition!
Your boss probably gave you an expensive subscription plan. Use it well. That’s how you do tokenmaxxing properly.
Yeah, I know models hallucinate. So ask them for links that back their claims. Read the links. Then argue with the model. “The documentation says this function mutates the items in place, but you said it doesn’t. Which one is right?” When in doubt, ask the model to write a test. Ask it to explain the tests too. See previous paragraphs.
And when one day you suddenly mutter to yourself, “This AI sucks and gets things wrong all the time.” Congratulations. You are no longer junior.