The way I’m using it now I figured out through trial and error. I form a mental model of what I want from start to finish. I then break that down into pieces, and use AI (when appropriate) to generate the code for each piece in sequence. This essentially leaves me in power of the entire development process, but the AI helps me produce the syntax much quicker than I could without it.
1. I spend less time fiddling with Flutter/SwiftUI to make things look decent. 2. I don't have to worry about simple data management code much. 3. I learn new things much faster by watching AI does its thing.
AI coding removed the bad part of coding. Lets you handle all the fun part; and you can of course always go and 'code' yourself, you dont have to prompt everything.
The new "developer" skill is ensuring that you're building a reliable app that isnt a house of cards. AI will tend to give you bare minimum. You cant have that, your prompts need to be better.
Also stuff like leetcode goes away hopefully soon as as long as you understand a data structure and it's benefits you don't have to learn to implement it in every language?
What I've observed the benefits to be: AI chat apps are great at internet searches that can filter out all the nonsense. They are good at transferring algorithms between languages. They're great at knowing common patterns.
I still write all my own code 100%, AI has simply replaced my Google research (ironically using Gemini).
The fun / creative part for me is not googling “how to slurp the contents of a file into a string” or “the exact syntax for marking some functions as unit tests” or “the correct order of symbols to specify generic type param”
It’s not “the correct html / css syntax for this basic gui I want to make”
It’s not “how to achieve the thing I’ve done 10 thousand times in other languages/frameworks, but for this language/framework”
It’s figuring the core logic out, building the thing while skipping the boring stuff, playing with abstractions that scratch my itch.
From this pov, AI is the best thing that has happened to my weekend coding. I code recreationally way more than before. Before AI, I would try a new language or framework, and I’d give up halfway because re-figuring out basic stuff for the umpteenth time is boring, it’s not fun at all. Now AI lets me skip those boring parts.
AI has made coding fun again for me.
AI has increased my interest in programming, because it's made me far more productive and it's quicker to learn new things. I am more creative than ever because I have new avenues.
The parts I don't like about coding are figuring out little details, or figuring out 'how to do X thing' that I've never done before when I'm not really sure where to start.
I have fun with the logic and making things work how I want them to work, and getting an end result that I like.
So it's been nice having something I can give details on what I want the end result to be, and getting suggestions on ways to get there. Or just have it figure out silly little issues for me.
I like the design aspect of implementations. But coding has always been drudgery. LLMs have removed a lot of that drudgery. I just test the output and read it for correctness, see if it’s well formed etc.
MongooseStudios•2h ago