How Programmers Compete with AI-Based Agents Without Fear: A Simple Strategy for Success

Did you know the capabilities of AI development agents exceed those of real-world programmers? Did you know Cursor AI IDE reduces your time of development? From the analysis of the codebase to post-development self-testing, the IDE is similar to the standard R&D model. How a traditional programmer behaves in a rapidly changing environment where low-skill programmers generate similar code that an expert creates.

Macro Thinking Model

Do not compete with the LLM development model. LLMs always write better code with the best quality, efficiency, and logic. If you were proud yesterday because of the decoupled design and excellent coding style, now it is meaningless. It’s time to shift from being a code developer to a higher-level designer. Now you could easily become an architect.

AI changes the development model. You need to think and design at the macro level and express these ideas clearly in words. Try to achieve excellence in macro design, detailed design, data structure design, and API design. You need to test the function as early as possible with the help of AI agents. Develop skills to form a complete and feasible design document for your application.

It is the stage where AI fails and human brainpower is required to create a design model at the macro level. When everything looks clear, then AI implements your design documents.

Summarize your design documents.

After creating the documents, you keep the documents in the code repository. It is also better to keep these documents in a private place where you can collect them later on to design a similar app. Moreover, you can use the AI tool to summarize the points, and this will also be helpful in app creation process.

1. List the frameworks, libraries, and plugins.
2. Prepare your documents in order. Because when you submit your documents to AI, it will understand them to meet the key points such as use case, architecture design, data structure, API design, test cases, etc.
3. You can keep most confirmed documents in the git repo.
4. If you are going to launch a new feature, the previous design documents must have the relevant requirements description.
5. AI can generate code for you; you need to run the unit tests and make necessary reviews and changes.

Unit Testing

The core skill of most advanced programmers is setting up the use case scenario. Define the input and expected output. Check if the actual output of the program is consistent or not.

Today, you are not dependent on your code-writing skills; if the error occurs and is not solvable, change the code with the help of AI. Implement according to your ideas. Break the code into smaller parts and verify each part because a large amount of code generated by AI may consume more time.