Learn to code – and to prompt
My experience with tools like GitHub Copilot is just that. AI isn’t going to create complete and finished applications out of whole cloth, but because I am an experienced developer, I know what to ask it for, and I can tell if what it has given me is correct. In other words, I know what I need to know, and that lets me leverage AI to do the work for me.
Here’s an example. Consider this prompt:
Can you write a TypeScript React component for displaying user profiles, with props for name, email, avatarUrl, and bio? The component should include basic Tailwind styling and gracefully handle missing or null values. Please include a brief test suite using Jest.
Now, that prompt will be pretty effective in getting what is asked for. But the trick here, obviously, is that you have to know what a React component is, what Tailwind is, the fact that you want tests, what TypeScript is, what null is, and that you’d even need to handle missing values. There is a lot of knowledge and experience wrapped up in that prompt, and it’s not something that an inexperienced developer, or certainly a non-developer, would be able to write.
