Prompt. Build. Ship.:: AI for Web Devs Build x3 Times Faster - страница 9

Specifically, we’ll cover tools for code generation, general-purpose AI chats for coding, specialized AI chats for web development, coding assistants, and AI code editors.

Let’s get started!

Welcome to Lesson 1! In this lesson, we’ll explore the role that generative AI plays in the web development process. We’ll go through some examples, use cases, and key things you need to understand.

The first and most important point to grasp is that AI is a nice-to-have addition to your process, not a must-have. Why? Because you can still write code without AI, just like we’ve been doing for years.

It’s crucial to understand this because it helps you avoid FOMO (the fear of missing out).

These days, it feels like new AI tools are popping up all the time, and we might think, "I must use this, it’s going to make things easier." And yes, it might—but remember, AI is just a nice-to-have addition.

So, what role does it play in our process? How exactly does it help? The answer is simple: AI saves time and energy.

That’s it. It doesn’t add something new or necessary to your process—it just helps you work faster.

Yes, AI can write code for us and do some of the thinking, but we can still do this ourselves. I want to emphasize this: AI doesn’t replace us; it helps us work more efficiently.

Let’s take a step back and look at how things worked before AI.

As developers, we’d manually search for answers—we’d Google things, go to Stack Overflow, read articles, watch YouTube videos—and then we’d summarize all that information and apply it to our projects. We’d basically think through problems and write the code ourselves.

So, what’s changed in the AI era? Now, we ask AI for solutions. For example, if we have an app and want to add a feature, we’ll ask AI how to implement it.

We provide it with our files or the documentation of a third-party library, and AI generates the code for us. In short, we now prompt AI and check its output. Before the AI era, we would think and write; now, we prompt and check.

Here’s an interesting fact: according to Google’s CEO, over 25% of new code at Google is now generated by AI.

This is a big deal because it shows the direction the industry is heading in. To be a successful developer today, we need to be part of this trend. What does this mean for us? It means the pace of work has increased.