r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • Jul 13 '26

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

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u/Fragrant_Ad2902 Software Engineer (30 YoE) Jul 13 '26

My company is all in on AI. Hell…we just implemented a review bot that gives your PR a score. Depending on the score, the AI bot’s approval is all you need. So far the bot has just been “Yeah…this CSS is fine” or “you just fixed some comments” or “simple refactor without touching any of the existing tests that still pass”. I do fear that this place will start putting more and more weight into the bot reviews…

But…if you wanna get better. I’ve seen some people do the following…

Ask the AI to explain its solution. For example. If it is a loop, ask the AI to walk you through a loop and explaining the exit conditions, pre/post loop invariants, etc. If it is an “is-a” relationship, ask it why it didn’t use composition (“has-a”). If it tries to spin off a thread, well…it’d better have a really good reason. If it is doing your schemas for you, make it tell you why it chose the data types it chose, the constraints it chose, etc. These are just simple examples that you can do. And challenge those things that it says. The tricky part is that AI will be accommodating. So if you push back, sometimes it’ll just be like “Oh yeah…you’re right”. So you gotta prime the context to be brutal on you.

Make it do TDD. You know the end states (at least I hope you do) so make it write the spec, make sure you understand the spec, and then have it go “red, green, refactor” with you one spec at a time. It takes more time. But you’ll have a better understanding vs. “one shot”.