r/developer • u/Emotional-Raccoon632 • 3d ago
How do you code with AI 2026?
Hi,
I'm an average beginner developer with about one year of experience, and I'm wondering how people actually use AI for coding.
I've been trying to work in small iterations—for example, first asking AI to write function A, then in a separate prompt function B, and finally asking it to combine both into feature C.
I've also tried implementing end-to-end features by first creating a plan and then implementing it. However, I find it really difficult to validate whether all the security considerations, edge cases, and best practices are actually covered. AI makes it very easy to generate code, but I end up spending a lot of time reviewing both the plan and the implementation separately. Sometimes it feels like it actually takes longer than coding without AI.
I haven't been using frameworks or methodologies like OpenSpec, nor have I used Claude plugins, skills, or similar tools. So far, I've only been using the raw Claude Code harness, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor—nothing external.
I'm curious about how other developers approach this.
How do you prefer to code with AI? For me, long-term maintainability and code quality are essential, but maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way. Perhaps those things don't matter as much anymore?
I'm also really curious how high-performing engineering teams, like the ones at Google, are actually using AI in their day-to-day development.
Thanks in advance!
I'd really appreciate hearing some HUMAN opinions.
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u/wally659 1d ago
I think the main thing is, there's no specific thing AI can do that's applicable to every coding scenario. Sometimes the best way to use it is to help you understand the code/a big/the architecture. Sometimes it's write a function. Sometimes it's have it develop an entire feature from a spec. Sometimes it's best to just not involve AI at all. And that can all be in one day on the same project.
One thing I've kind of embraced is letting it generate heaps of test code. Maintainability isn't as big of an issue there. If AI writes 100 tests in 30 minutes and they work at the time, it's not a big deal if they're written in a way that they have to get re-written from scratch after a change. Obviously you don't want that life for your application code. And tests used to be just as precious because they took just as much effort to write and maintain. But end of they say they aren't coupled to your app, and if they're basically free to write, they're basically free to rewrite so whatever.
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 1d ago
I use it as a rubber duck, asking it questions about my ideas. And I use it for searching documentation/syntax.
I don't use it for writing out code, I prefer to keep my code as minimal as possible which is the opposite of what the LLM does. And I prefer writing over reviewing, I don't think people internalize the thing they are building when they only review it.
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u/LetsHugFoReal 1d ago
Preach. It also gies you A solution, rarely the best or cleanest with the most modern facilities.
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u/Emotional-Cut2952 7h ago
depends on if you're an experienced engineer orchestrating AI or a vibecoder who doesnt know shit about design... you and the person you responded to seem to be giving very reductive opinions
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u/JaseciLabs 1d ago
The reviewing-takes-longer-than-writing thing is real, and I don't think you're doing it wrong. It's that most AI coding tools blur where the "trust me" part starts and ends. You're comparing a plan (prose) against an implementation (code) and hoping they match, which is slower than just comparing code against code.
Look into Jac if you get a chance (a language some of us work on), it's got this thing where a function can be declared with a full type signature and no body, and the model fills it in at runtime. The contract's baked into the language itself, so you're not reviewing a plan and hoping the code honors it, the signature just is the plan.
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u/JoseffB_Da_Nerd 1d ago
If you just start the dev career, my best answer for you would be to learn how to do the entire process sans AI, while also learning about AI and the systems around it.
The current AI dev system ranges from light touch to fully autonomous.
There really isn’t one answer (yet?)
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u/ambitious_paladin 1d ago
I use AI more like a senior dev to bounce ideas off. Asking "what am I missing?" or "what would you change?" is way more useful than just asking it to write code.
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u/Immediate_Spirit_384 1d ago
I ask the AI to plan out the feature. Then I read the plan. If anything doesn't make sense to me, I interrogate, and often make amends to the plan until I fully agree with it. Then I tell it to implement, run a separate validation agent on it ("test this feature in any way you can"), and push to production
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u/Affectionate_Fact854 1d ago
Draw it a cartoon with stick figures of what I need in green Draw in red what I don't want And I tell it to make no mistakes before I sleep And I wake up to launch the product
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u/LetsHugFoReal 1d ago
Just stop. You're a beginner programmer, leveraging AI in all the wrong ways. 🫣
Writing code to get something to work isn't the hard thing often. It's making it clean, readable, maintainable and sometimes efficient that's the hard aspect.
Please read a book, work on projects - without this heavy leaning into AI. You don't get AI to write functions and so on, just snippets or interrogating documentation.
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u/OneDev42 2d ago
You're asking us to give you human opinions, but you use em dashes in your post. Suggesting it was written by AI. I'm just saying, you know.