“It’s really important to learn the boundaries of these tools and what they’re capable of to use them most effectively,” says Kevin Swiber, API strategist at Layered System. Swiber has developed a matrix to review AI coding agents across various dimensions, such as technical capabilities, workflow integrations, resource utilization, refactoring tasks, and debugging ability.
Program and test iteratively
Experts recommend working piece by piece with AI. “Ask for small code changes, not big ones,” says Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb. “Don’t generate an entire website at once, or an entire API at once, or an entire feature at once.”
If you’re working on a 3,000-line code file, you’ll probably need to break it apart. The thing is, refactoring with AI is challenging—AI has a habit of accidentally deleting code or moving things around without warning. “It will optimize for small things, and not keep big ideas in mind,” says Swiber.
