For the past few months I've been coding with both Claude and ChatGPT as my pair programming "buddies". Both are good, even though I'm more inclined to Claude.

Am I more productive? Absolutely. I can get a lot more done in a lot less time. But it doesn't replace vision, planning and logic.

AI won't build you a product by itself (for now)

I'm sure it's a PM's or a non-technical founder's wet dream to ask AI to build their product and get it done in hours. But it won't happen. AI understands how to do things at a granular level but not as a whole, or even less, as a business. It won't connect all the dots.

I tried it multiple times, I wanted to make a video about it, but failed every time. I spent more time debugging and eventually scrapping the codebase out of frustration.

Using AI the right way

This said, AI is extremely useful for developing. Even as a solo developer you can get months of work done in days or weeks instead. Here's how I use it everyday for completing tasks (as of this post I am using Cursor with Claude for mostly Ruby on Rails and Hugo/html site development):

- Ask it to help you start an empty project with dependencies

- Ask to help you with tedious tasks like: change the color and font of the marketing facing pages.

- Ask help with something that is not working

- Ask it to create or add a new feature to your product, but beware that you have to be very specific on the use case.

What not to do (for now) is write a full page prompt with an entire project description and expect it to code the entire thing to perfection.

- You still need to do QA

- You still need to worry about the user experience

- You still need to think about flows (see above)

- You still need to do all of the Devops work

- You still need to get in the trenches and do a lot of backend work

Will this change in the near future? Probably, at the pace AI is evolving. But for now, developers are still and will still be behind everything software, jus that maybe you don't need a 10-person team, maybe just a few working with AI will do the job just fine.