Hey!

I’m in charge of Easybook’s technical development, maintenance and security. The rise of AI-driven, agentic software development has reached our team as well, and we have used it extensively over the past year. The improvement in models has been astonishing and AI can produce complex features fast - with varying success. Here’s five tips for junior developers to maximize benefits of AI in development.

1. Create functional specification carefully for prompts

The model can’t read your thoughts or remind you of what happened in last Tuesday’s meeting. Create accurate specification of the feature at hand, including edge cases. Only then let the AI create tests and produce code based on that information.

2. Don’t blindly accept AI generated code.

This is a ticket to a bloated, flaky codebase, which is hard to understand and modify. Creating code is now fast and easy. Quality control is not. AI generated code can and must be fixed, if you see the reason for it. Think about your future self or colleague when you review your AI’s code, but above all, your beloved end-users.

3. Aim for minimal changes

AI generates a huge amount of code at a quick pace. A lot of it is unnecessary or repeats code that could be reused. Add an instruction to your agent explaining you want minimal code to get to a working solution. Before pushing code, check the line changes and ask yourself, does the feature at hand require that much?

4. Write small changes by hand

By offloading writing code entirely to AI, you could lose the ability to evaluate code critically or come up with better solutions. You lose the part of your brain responsible for innovation. From time to time, complete tasks by hand, this is great training for the mind and you don’t lose all control to AI. Inevitably comes the moment when AI can’t solve a problem, no matter how high the reasoning setting is cranked. These situations call for traditional software development skills.

5. The software ecosystem is much more than just the codebase 

Agentic development can not always be used outside the codebase. Remember, that the software lives and stays secure e.g. with the help of your local development environment, cloud environments and storage, domain services and secret management services. Always think like a hacker and expect the worst.

I wish you a great new era of software development!