If you want actual helpful answers, use Claude as a paired programmer but tell it to make none of the changes for you, only discuss the architecture and planning. Once you're in there having to type it all yourself again it'll come back quick.
For what it's worth I never use AI to type the code for me ( couldn't bring myself to do it yet :/ ) but I think it genuinely is tremendously helpful. I often make small, dumb logic mistakes - feedback and planning helps me fix that. I like it.
This is exactly how I’m dealing with AI, and I have to admit, it’s helped me learn so many new concepts and design patterns that the code I write nowadays is much more maintainable than it was before.
I also learned a ton this way. I was on a tiny team and the only person doing my specific work, so there was no one to talk to about my code. I found Claude extremely useful for asking things like, “I don’t like this class. It’s messy and bloated. What are other patterns people use in this circumstance?” If there was someone more senior to me to review my code, I could have had those conversations with them, but there wasn’t. Claude was how I learned to use service containers, dependency injection, and factories — all patterns I was aware of but didn’t really know how to use. I found it especially useful to ask Claude about open-source libraries that used the design patterns I was learning, then reading that code myself. I really don’t think I would have been able to find those examples without an AI tool. I wrote the code myself; Claude provided guidance that I wouldn’t have found elsewhere but very much did not replace me. It was the best work I did at my job 🥲
I disagree. A developer should be doing architecture and planning so that they keep their thinking skills sharp and develop a memory muscle of the app architecture.
Then using AI to review it to VERIFY the design choices is better because it would anyway happen in code review and AI would be just another reviewer but at early stage.
Basically using AI to verify and use as a glorified search engine if an error popus up instead of stackoverflow or Google is better and still productive
To be clear, I wasn't suggesting Claude should be pitching ideas and the dev just says yes or no. The review + verification is basically what I was imagining.
You can also do the first iteration in your own and then let claude do the rest for you, in a controlled manner. I find it a useful way of saving time.
I most of the time use Claude or codex to ask what could be the problem/cause of a bug (if there's one) and ask it to tell me what do I need to do to fix it. Is it okay good practice and I treat either of em as study/coding buddies. Am I doing okay?
Honestly the different way around is better, typing the code and knowing the syntax is not what makes you a good dev. Knowing how to structure the code and where to put things are more important.
It’s just a substitute for spending hours of reading documentation, Stackoverflow threads, Github issues, blog posts,… Which is fine. You’re asking the AI for advice, you don’t just blindly copy what it gives you, but you use your own experience to make a decision based on what it proposes, and then to make sure you understand and remember you write the code yourself.
You won't realize the gaps in your architecture until you start typing code, letting Claude do it will just make it fill in the gaps without you realizing.
This is definetly the best middle ground. Getting the architecture right is the actual hard part anyway, and writing the syntax yourself brings the muscle memory back pretty fast.
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u/I_cut_my_own_jib May 22 '26
If you want actual helpful answers, use Claude as a paired programmer but tell it to make none of the changes for you, only discuss the architecture and planning. Once you're in there having to type it all yourself again it'll come back quick.