🆓 Adjusting Your Mindset
It's easy to feel disoriented when you first start working with AI coding tools. It feels like they're doing a large part of your job for you, which is never fun, because coding is fun - isn't it?
The way I think of this is that solving problems is fun. The actual typing of code... well if you like typing, then sure. The trick, I find, is to make AI work for you. Rather than tell it to "figure out how to do X and Y", you figure out how to do X and Y first, then tell AI to build it.
For instance: you might have an idea for a startup or side hustle. Rather than tell the AI to "come up with a database schema for an online auction site called expiredfoods.com", you start the process yourself, thinking through the spec.
What are the tables you might need for this project? Think it through, write some notes, and take a first swing knowing you can always iterate.
A blog, for instance, would have a posts table with slug, title,published_at, created_at, excerpt, and author fields. You could write out the SQL yourself for this table, or simply prompt for it:
create a `posts` table for SQLite with `slug`, `title`,`published_at`, `created_at`, `excerpt`, and `author` fields. Use the `text` data type for all strings.
Here's the result:
You just saved yourself 10 or so minutes or so of trying to remember the SQL for this! OK, so maybe you DB wizards could have written it in 2-5 minutes, but I had it finished in 30 seconds!
That's all the AI should do for you - save you time. You do the thinking.