Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.

I don't understand why people take bad coding practices and just let AI run with it and then expect nothing but poor quality code. Nothing about the AI revolution here changes how good software has always been written. Write tests, use a typed language, review code. If you have good patterns, good procedures, AI fits right in and fills in the blanks perfectly. Poor AI results tend to be the pot calling the kettle black.

I can relate to a lot of this.

Where I find AI most useful is getting it to do tasks I already know how to do, but would take time.

If you understand the problem you are trying to solve well enough to explain it to the LLM, you can get good results, you can also eyeball the outputted code and know right away if it's what you are after.

Getting it to do things you don't know how to do is where it goes off the rails IMO

My preferred approach in similar situations is to ask an LLM for an initial solution or code snippet, then take over manually - no endless prompt tweaking, just stop prompting and start coding. Finally (optionally), I let the LLM do a final pass to review my completed solution for bugs, optimizations, etc.

The key win is skipping the prompt refinement loop, which is (A) tedious and time-consuming, and (B) debilitating in the long run.

Filler content.

> Our marketing director (that’d be me) said that if we don’t write something about it, we will be left behind...

You had nothing to say and you just wasted my time.