The impact of AI coding for developers

I used Copilot when it first emerged, but I didn’t find it very useful at that time, so I gave up using it.

However, recently there are more and more people talking about Cursor in my feed, so I decided to give it a try. It offers a free trial and can be purchased if you want to upgrade to the pro version.

In order to understand it better, I also read some articles and watched videos about tips and tricks, like cursor101.

After the end of the trial, I immediately upgraded to the pro version. What a good assistant it is!

I use it to add new form fields to existing pages, and transfer all the form fields to URL params so that I can share the URL with others.

I use it to generate Ant Design table columns by providing the TypeScript interface.

I use it to refactor some messy code like extracting the a large jsx function into a separate component.

This simple task is done so quickly and accurately by AI. My job is to tell the AI what I want, and it will generate the code.

So, I started to wonder if there are too many developers in the market and if this is the end for junior developers?

There are several inevitable trends in the future:

• AI coding will be more and more popular and more clear.
• It really lowers the barrier for programming. You don’t need to spend hundreds of hours to learn a programming language. Everyone can build a simple webpage by asking the AI tools.

So, what is our preparation for the future?

1. We need to catch up the latest AI tools and learn how to use them. The evolution of AI is changing so fast. There are new tools emerging every day like the latest Copilot, some say it is already a strong competitor of Cursor.

2. Focus on complex problems like Performance Optimization, Architecture Design and so on. The AI tools only understand a few pages of code. They fail if there are several systems to interact with.

3. Stop memorizing APIs or syntax. I heard a story before: a company employed a new team and found those developers were really efficient. Later, the company discovered those developers had worked on military projects before, where there was no access to the internet, so they had to memorize all the APIs. Those days are gone.

4. Understanding the internal systems of the company. AI is trained on public data, it doesn’t understand the legacy systems of the company. So, maybe this is our advantage.

5. Soft skills are more important. Pay more attention to sharing your ideas and making your voice heard. Unique ideas make you different from others.

6. Familiar with the business. There are not so much complex tasks. Most of our work is finishing the business requirements. So, the more you know the business, the more valuable you are.