v6: AI in our workflows

📍 Brighton, 🇬🇧 

🥃 TL;DR

• I found the best pie in the UK

• We can’t work without AI anymore

• Tech leaders and CEOs are pushing for AI-powered development

• Still need to be a software engineer though

• Development tools and frameworks are adapting to AI workflows

• With AI craft and quality is lost

• smolagents is da bomb! 💣

Starting with the most important news for this week 👇

I’ve gotten myself a pie from The Pie Hole! It was one of the best pies I’ve ever eaten in the entire UK! 💯

Moving on!

When starting this newsletter, I didn’t have a theme. I didn’t expect to lean towards any particular directions, JavaScript, back-end, soft skills, nothing. I wanted to talk about everything and different topic in every issue.

After 6 issues I’m starting to see a repeated theme though - AI.

Mainly because I’m paying attention the most to the developments and updates in that area, and maybe because this is what our industry wants us to become now: AI-powered developers.

And when I say industry, I do mean all the CEOs…

…and tech leaders alike!

AI is making a significant dent in the way we work.

And I kinda get them, because if I had my own company (and hopefully one day I will) I would want my developers to be productive. And I don’t mean 100% vibing without any precaution or checks, I mean writing templated code with AI and focusing on more useful things, things that AI cannot do as of today.

And experience is important, so not downplaying the experience of software devs, without it, something like this 👇 can happen (and you know what that means!)

Or we end up with something like this 👇️ 😆 

So turns out you do need to have software engineer experience/knowledge/skills to build with AI, despite what a lot of people claim.

And reality is, if a software engineer works with AI, they’re not vibe coding, they’re coding with AI. There’s a difference.

What’s interesting is that because AI is impacting our workflow, tools are adapting as well!

Just think about it: creators of frameworks not only think about developer experience now but also about how AI is going to accept it.

Funny thing is, as much as Next.js is trying to be at forefront of AI, I haven’t heard of them trying to adapt Next.js to AI-powered workflow.

Don’t take my word for it though, I may be just ignorant about what’s happening there. Haven’t worked with Next.js for a year now. Hopefully, I get to keep it that up.

Astro FTW!

And just like in every AI conversation, the topic of quality comes up a lot. In his article, Linear CEO mentioned that quality is in craft

But then with progress, there’s starting to be less of the craft, and more of “Just ship it.” attitude. And with AI there’s going to be even less craft and less quality

Nonetheless, the progress isn’t stopping. I’d say we embrace it, but still keep this piece of realisation in mind.

By the way, If you’re looking for a way to start with AI, prompts is a good way to start. It’s both important at the beginning of your journey and later on the advanced stages as well. Prompting is a big part of working with LLM

PS If for whatever reason you still don’t know how and where to use AI but you really want to be relevant, here’s a package for you! 👇 😆

🎓️ Top Learning Materials of the Week

Nothing comes to mind… There wasn’t much learning this week, mostly doing, reading docs, etc. Let’s come back to this next week. 😄 

⚒️ Tools of the Week

🤗 smolagents - If you're like me and hate langgraph, then smolagents is for you. They're straightforward, easy to work with, and simple to extend and complement with LlamaIndex, which I also love