Have you ever found a GitHub project or anything that seemed nice and tempting to install until you dug a bit deeper?
What are some red flags that should detur anyone from installing and running something?
Have you ever found a GitHub project or anything that seemed nice and tempting to install until you dug a bit deeper?
What are some red flags that should detur anyone from installing and running something?
I mean, I do leet code semi-regularly, so I’m not too worried about getting rusty. Writing tests is boring as hell, the AI does a decent enough job for at least 90% of them.
Leet code is good for making sure you still have a good grasp of programming conceptually, but I don’t think it’s good for testing your own practical skills.
Seriously, just take an hour or two to scaffold out something new. Doesn’t have to be complicated, just something to confirm for yourself that you can still do it. The only rule is to do it without AI.
When I did it myself, it was after months of my work requiring me to use AI, and there was a moment at the start where I was tempted to just fire up Copilot and tell it to do the work, which - of course - would have defeated the purpose. It was that moment where I realized I was addicted, and needed to go cold turkey.
Now I do the bare minimum with AI I’m required to at work, and focus on crafting my code carefully, by hand as much as possible. And it shows. My code quality has improved.
What do you mean by scaffolding something new? If it’s writing all the boilerplate for the framework and dependencies, that’s exactly what I don’t care about. I use AI now and copy paste in the past.
No, I don’t mean writing all the boilerplate. It’s simpler than that.
Just to take a random example, let’s say the throwaway project you decide to do is build a custom button component in Angular. The steps would be something like this:
ng new buttonscd buttonsng serveI chose Angular because these days the CLI for it does almost everything for you. It’s absurdly easy, and is the sort of thing it may actually be slower to ask an AI to do, because the AI will absolutely try to create a bunch of things in the project itself rather than through the CLI. And it will use Angular patterns from 2024 rather than anything current (such as Signals), because of its training data.
Not only is doing something like this (in whatever language you prefer) good practice for keeping your practical skills, it’s a good reminder that AI is only one tool in the toolbox. If it becomes your only tool, well… The old saying about how if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail applies.
Back when I had to do frontend the AI did use create-react-app. No idea about angular. If it’s on stack overflow, the AI knows about it (even if it doesn’t always use it).
Even if you ask to create a one shot PoC, sometimes it will use Maven, sometimes Gradle. If you want something specific you include it in the prompt or preferences.