Software Engineering After AI

About a year ago, I started experimenting with using AI to develop software. At first, I wasn’t very impressed. I had quite high expectations, partly influenced by the media. But then I began to realize that you have to guide the AI by asking the right questions. Don’t expect the AI to generate readable, maintainable code if you simply say, “Can you implement feature X for me?” It will just do that (sometimes incorrectly) and generate one big blob of code. Writing code with AI is similar to agile development: you work in small steps. In the diagram below, you can see the workflow I used. I added a brain icon to indicate where human interaction is especially important. You need to be able to ask the right questions to push the AI in the right direction. Without proper guidance, the AI quickly get lost. Sometimes the AI is simply not able to solve your problem. In those cases, you have to implement it yourself. I was quite impressed with the results. I built a user interface with React (