Treat the AI like it's yourself

If you're struggling to see the value in AI as a developer, a simple tip I can offer: treat the AI/LLM like it's you.

Think about it this way: what knowledge do you have? How do you do your work?

Now, with that information in mind, turn that into the context and prompts you feed to the LLM.

Simple, right?

This works shockingly well, both in a technical sense but also a personal sense. Because you're treating the AI like a clone of yourself, it's easier to reason about what to tell and ask the LLM to do. Instead of feeding it low-quality prompts, write your prompts like you'd write a spec or notes for yourself.

Get into the details. Be verbose on purpose. Write prompts like you would an email to or Github description for a junior developer. Just like they don't have all of the information, neither does your LLM.

The more detailed and specific a prompt (use these tools and techniques, not these), the better your result.

And just like you occasionally need redirection and steering, so does an LLM.

Treat it like a clone of yourself that has limited energy and mental capacity. When it starts to get "brain fog," switch to a new chat. Don't just assume that an LLM with a large context window will work efficiently at all context sizes (read: they don't; not even close).

You can get incredible results this way.

I recently used this approach to help me implement a database for my JavaScript framework, Joystick. Aside from prompting and steering, I wrote maybe one or two lines of code by hand.

99% of the project was written exclusively by AI.

Admittedly, as an old school "keypig" type of developer, this is jarring at first. Similar to trying to learn how to use a keyboard-driven IDE like vim or emacs.

The only way I've found to get around that is to—ironically, like most things—push through the initial hurdles until you get into a flow state.

But once you do: it's hard to ever think about going back to the old ways. I still write plenty of code by hand, but for many tasks, you really can't beat this setup.