AI in my workflow
I've been writing code to build website since 2025. It started as a hobby, then a passion, and now it's my job and my company. I started using GitHub Copilot in February 2024, and it's been great. I mostly use it for autocomplete, maybe ask it questions, but reading documentation and Googling things are my main approach to figuring things out. I'd found AI to be inconsistent when it spans over multiple lines of code. Sonnet 4.5 was my main model, but I didn't know Anthropic or Claude until recently.
I tried Claude
I had been hearing about Claude for a while, but I didn't think much of it. Until I decided to ask it to do a web redesign for my personal project. It wasn't great, but it was able to string together lines of code and make a decent looking website. I was impressed, so I looked into Claude Code. After using it for a couple of weeks, I found it to be very good a building a prototype. I am still a backend engineer at heart, so security isn't something I feel comfortable having and AI handle without me being fully involved. But for a prototype, a quick prompt to build a static website with some functionaility is amazing. I was able to build an image compression tool and deploy it within a couple of hours. It's a tool I use very frequently to optimize images for my customer's websites. There are good alternatives. I just wanted to have one for myself.
The balance
I love writing code. I am decent at it. And it's important that I get better. Writing code is pretty much the only way. For now, here are my rules:
- I will use AI as a tool to help me with my job, but I will not ship code I do not understand.
- I will continue have my side projects where I will write my own code and use AI as a tool to help me with some things.
I'm not afraid of AI taking my job
I don't think AI will replace software developers. Even if it does, I can still code, so that's fine by me. I will keep building stuff with code until I can't anymore.