Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

Can you talk through specifically what sprint goals you’ve completed in an afternoon? Hopefully multiple examples.

Grounding these conversations in an actual reality affords more context for people to evaluate your claims. Otherwise it’s just “trust me bro”.

And I say this as a Senior SWE who’s successfully worked with ChatGPT to code up some prototype stuff, but haven’t been able to dedicate 100+ hours to work through all the minutia of learning how to drive daily with it.

I think experiences vary. AI can work well with greenfield projects, small features, and helping solve annoying problems. I've tried using it on a large Python Django codebase and it works really well if I ask for help with a particular function AND I give it an example to model after for code consistency.

But I have also spent hours asking Claude and ChatGPT with help trying to solve several annoying Django problems and I have reached the point multiple times where they circle back and give me answers that did not previously work in the same context window. Eventually when I figure out the issue, I have fun and ask it "well does it not work as expected because the existing code chained multiple filter calls in django?" and all of a sudden the AI knows what is wrong! To be fair, there was only one sentence in the django documentation that mentions not chaining filter calls on many to many relationships.

If you do want to get more into it, I'd suggest something that plugs into your IDE instead of Copy/Paste with ChatGPT. Try Aider or Roo code. I've only used Aider, and run it in the VS terminal. It's much nicer to be able to leave comments to the AI and have it make the changes to discrete parts of the app.

I'm not the OP, but on your other point about completing sprint goals fast - I'm building a video library app for myself, and wanted to add tagging of videos. I was out dropping the kids at classes and waiting for them. Had 20 minutes and said to Aider/Claude - "Give me an implementation for tagging videos." It came back with the changes it would make across multiple files: Creating a new model, a service, configuring the DI container, updating the DB context, updating the UI to add tags to videos and created a basic search form to click on tags and filter the videos. I hit build before the kids had finished and it all worked. Later, I found a small bug - but it saved me a fair bit of time. I've never been a fast coder - I stare at the screen and think way too much (function and variable names are my doom ... and the hardest problem in programming, and AI fixes this for me).

Some developers may be able to do all this in 20 minutes, but I know that I never could have. I've programmed for 25 years across many languages and frameworks, and know my limitations. A terrible memory is one of them. I would normally spend a good chunk of time on StackOverflow and the documentation sites for whatever frameworks/libraries I'm using. The AI has reduced that reliance and keeps me in the zone for longer.