My Use of AI

In the rapidly evolving tech industry, the term "vibe coding" is gaining popularity. This refers to the practice of allowing AI to create code, posting it online, and hoping it functions correctly. Personally, I don't care what others label it or how they use AI. What matters to me is how I use it and what benefits it can provide for me.

Using AI For Software Development

I'm going to level with you. Yes, I use AI. I use it a lot. I use it in game development and web development. I use it for writing and for research. It's a great tool, but only if you use it in a better way than others. I prefer the term "prompt engineering" over "vibe coding" as an everyday term. To me, vibe coding means letting AI run without checking or testing the code. Ask -> Generate -> Paste -> Ship. That's a terrible dev cycle. For people that can't code or can't even read code, it's like magic to them. Suddenly, everyone's grandmother is a coder because she followed a ChatGPT instruction to save this generatedPythonScript and enter this randomCommandlineSequence to get it working. Boom! We are all programmers! Not.

Prompt engineering is better. Prompt the AI, test the code. Ensure it works before saving, before pushing to the repo, and definitely before shipping to production. AI has helped save me hundreds of hours of having to write code.

But I still know enough to be able to:

• Read the code

• Understand the code

• Change the code

• Write the code (mostly)

• Fix the code

If a user cannot do those things, they probably shouldn't be building software. Knowing the right questions to "prompt" is better than asking for the solution without knowing the actual issues and complexities within the question.