Here are my 2¢ on using AI at work. I’m using Claude code and my typical tmux/neovim setup.
1. I use AI to find my way in a sprawling micro(service|frontend) system that I am new to. This helps cut down massively on the “I know what to do, I just can’t figure out where.” I started a new job where everyone has years of context as to how things fit together and I have none. I feel strongly that I need to give an honest effort at finding things on my own before asking for help, and AI certainly helps there.
2. Anything I stumble upon in a dev/deployment process that leans too heavily into the “good behavior/hygiene,” I try to automate immediately for myself and then clean up to share with the team. In the past, I might have tried to adopt the common practice, but now it’s less effort to simply automate it away.
3. There is value in using AI in the same manner as I use vim macros: I use the planning mode heavily and iterate like crazy until I’m satisfied with the flow. If the task has a lot of repetition, I typically do the first one myself then let the AI take a whack at one or two. If I don’t like the process, I update the plan. Once I see things going smoothly, I give the AI the ok to finish the rest (making atomic commits so that it’s not just one big ball of wax). This is pretty similar to how I record macros (make one change yourself, record the macro on the next line, test it out for a line or 2, re-record if necessary, test again, plow through the rest).
4. When I come across something that needs to be fixed/could be improved but isn’t related to my task at hand, I do a few minutes of research and planning with the AI, and instead of coding a solution, we create a todo document or an issue in a tracking system. This wasn’t happening before because of the context switching required to write good documentation for later. Now it’s more of the same thing but akin to a dry run of a script.
5. I can quickly generate clear and easy to read reports to allow other teammates to give me feedback on work in flight. Think about a doc with before and after screenshots of changes throughout an app produced by a playwright script and a report generator that I can rerun in under a minute whenever I want.
I’m finding that I really enjoy the skipping the tedious stuff, and I’m also writing higher quality stuff because I have more bandwidth. It helps me collaborate more with my non dev peers because it lowers the barrier to sharing.
Important to note that in my experimenting, I haven’t had great luck with winding it up and setting it loose on a task. Too often it felt like being a junior engineer again, doomed to throw spaghetti at the wall. Once I started using AI as an assistant, I felt things really started to click. Software development is about writing code, but it’s about a lot of other things too. It’s nice when the AI can help write code, but it’s fantastic when it helps you accomplish the other things.