I hope that coding challenges remains the primary content! I have 7 million other newsletters telling me how to use AI. I value this newsletter for helping me hone my own skills still, which I think are especially necessary to maintain as I work with AI.
I like what you are doing here. Honestly, I still think there is a place for the content and challenges you are putting out. It is good for someone who wants to get better at or start using AI dev tools by building things with them. It is also good for those who want to improve their coding skills the "old fashion" way. I think both skillsets are necessary, at least for now, so keep doing what your doing and people can build the skills they are looking to build.
I currently work as a pre-sales/solutions engineer for a software company, which means most of my development work consists of small demo/proof-of-concept projects. At this scale, I have found that Claude Code, as prompted and guided by me and my two decades of experience in software development, is an invaluable assistant. It can fill in knowledge areas where I am lacking or cannot easily recall the details, and it grinds out boilerplate code with considerable speed and accuracy. The most capable models are even capable of "one-shotting" simple game prototypes.
I remain skeptical that these tools are useful or even safe to deploy in mission-critical domains. But there's a large swath of problems for which they are undeniably helpful. Unfortunately, this swath overlaps considerably with the kinds of problems that junior developers need to cut their teeth on. So my feelings are, to say the least, ambivalent.
We need to know what needs to be produced by the AI, hence we should be able to write the same implementations ourselves. This is why we still need to keep learning how to build complex software, and code generation is only part of that process.
I hope that coding challenges remains the primary content! I have 7 million other newsletters telling me how to use AI. I value this newsletter for helping me hone my own skills still, which I think are especially necessary to maintain as I work with AI.
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.
I like what you are doing here. Honestly, I still think there is a place for the content and challenges you are putting out. It is good for someone who wants to get better at or start using AI dev tools by building things with them. It is also good for those who want to improve their coding skills the "old fashion" way. I think both skillsets are necessary, at least for now, so keep doing what your doing and people can build the skills they are looking to build.
Love the focus on AI as a tool, not a replacement, context and problem-solving still matter.
I currently work as a pre-sales/solutions engineer for a software company, which means most of my development work consists of small demo/proof-of-concept projects. At this scale, I have found that Claude Code, as prompted and guided by me and my two decades of experience in software development, is an invaluable assistant. It can fill in knowledge areas where I am lacking or cannot easily recall the details, and it grinds out boilerplate code with considerable speed and accuracy. The most capable models are even capable of "one-shotting" simple game prototypes.
I remain skeptical that these tools are useful or even safe to deploy in mission-critical domains. But there's a large swath of problems for which they are undeniably helpful. Unfortunately, this swath overlaps considerably with the kinds of problems that junior developers need to cut their teeth on. So my feelings are, to say the least, ambivalent.
More challenges please. Using AI still requires domain expertise if you want to use it well.
Very true, thank you.
"More coding challenges" with "more focus on how to change with the industry and leverage AI"
We need to know what needs to be produced by the AI, hence we should be able to write the same implementations ourselves. This is why we still need to keep learning how to build complex software, and code generation is only part of that process.
A mix of more coding tutorials and how to change with the industry and leverage AI