AI-Assisted Coding: Knowing When to Type It Yourself
AI coding assistants are powerful. I use them daily. But the goal is to be efficient — not to maximize the percentage of AI-generated code in my projects. Here are five situations where I’ve learned to close the chat and just write the damn code myself. 1. Code you know by heart # You don't need AI for this users = [u for u in data if u["active"]] with open("config.json") as f: config = json.load(f) List comprehensions. Context managers. Basic dict manipulations. If you’ve written these patterns hundreds of times, the time spent typing a prompt exceeds the time spent typing the code. ...