The correct way to use AI for development

Day 334 / 366

I think I have figured out how to use AI-powered tools to increase the productivity of my company.

Six months ago, when I started building this team of interns at my office, I made it clear that I didn’t want any of them using ChatGPT to code. And I had my reasons. The tasks that I gave them were supposed to be easy tasks. The objective was that in the process of figuring out how to do those tasks themselves not only will they learn a lot, but they will gain a lot of confidence as well. Using ChatGPT defeated the whole purpose of it.

Regardless, it’s clear to me that if my team doesn’t use AI at all to assist them in coding, they are going to get left behind. The problem is not AI, the problem is not knowing how to use them.

So this is my plan. I am going to start creating a database of useful prompts that can assist me in common coding tasks, like writing dummy APIs, or unit tests. Once I have tested these well, I will give my team access to them as well. I will explain to them what the prompt is doing so that they don’t just blindly use it.

As the team continue to use these vetted prompts, they will run into issues which we will fix by modifying them. Soon we will have sets of high-quality prompts that will increase our development speed many folds.