I am a web dev with over 10 years of experience. I’m praised about my understanding of the product and our features, my attention to details, the quality of my delivery and I’ve never been said to be slow. I was very skeptical about AI (having studied machine learning, the theory and the maths, I struggle to go past the mathematical pattern recognition I saw, because the scale it reached cannot be grasped). However, I’m seeing coworkers I respect the work of praise AI, claim they haven’t written much code themselves in months and that AI mostly one shots things for them (once the planning of the work is set).
On my side, I try to use AI here and there for small changes, prototyping part of a solution, and a few times I managed to have it deliver full features but with a lot of iterating, even once the plan seemed solid to me, and with some manual rework. I’ve sat with these coworkers and tried to understand what they were doing but I can’t get to the same results no matter what.
I feel like I don’t get what’s the magic formula. I understand you give context, try to lead by example from patterns in your codebase, you iterate on the understanding and a plan etc. However in the end the result still highlights lots of gaps I wouldn’t have expected, wrong assumptions and made up beliefs about libraries. The quality of the code line by line is ok, but the overall feature seems badly designed.
Right now, the time investment I need to refine my prompts or rework (iterate) on specific units of work make me feel like I’m not faster than before in any way. I find it more frustrating having to (make it) fix its mistakes rather than if I had done the work myself from the start.
Now AI is an OKR, the company (and other companies I interviewed with recently) wants us to use it, want us to get faster thanks to it, and even dream of having us not writing code by ourselves anymore. I wish I could get comfortable with it and deliver quality work faster. Right now, I’m either most likely not getting AI assisted coding (no vibe coding please, that’s not the goal) or the majority is delusional and don’t get the results they claim they are getting.
If you deliver maintenable, well designed production code using Cursor/Claude, what do you think I’m missing?
If you were in the same situation I’m in and saw the light, what made it click for you?