how Senior Devs code with
Hey there, Bogdan and I are back from our mini holiday! What a better topic to talk about than coding with AI. YouTube is full of influencers promising that AI you will make you up to 100x faster…
Sep 4, 2025 · 2 MIN READ
Hey there,
Bogdan and I are back from our mini holiday!
What a better topic to talk about than coding with AI.
YouTube is full of influencers promising that AI you will make you up to 100x faster writing code.
Most of them are a bunch of bullsh**t!
They throw around buzzwords like MCP, deterministic chains and all kind of crap… Because the more scientific it sounds…
The more likely you are to believe it!
In practice, a lot of this “AI coding” is mostly guess work.
Anyways.
Even if you don’t buy the hype… Your CTO might… You will be forced to use AI regardless of whether you like it or not!
Here’s are 5 no-BS “best practices” when coding with AI:
Keep your context small – Funny enough, more context makes models dumber. Keep it simple, clear, and refresh your windows often.
Double down on testing and solid CI/CD – Aim for >65% code coverage. Be careful, AI sometimes writes test that don’t really test anything. Keep your branches clean - rebases, squash and be very careful with deployment (have a rollback strategy)
Remember the “full responsibility principle” – AI didn’t write the code, you did. Review every line and take it seriously. If not, you will damage your reputation.
Program against interfaces - Uncle Bob was a bit annoying, but the principles he collected are even more true when coding with AI. Structure scales, chaos doesn’t. Also, double down on deterministic tooling: strict typing, schemas and linters are non-negotiable.
Architecture matters more than ever - AI struggles managing giant monoliths (remember, context window limitations). Break the scope and build smaller services.
Again, if you are just a “vibe coding” amateur, this stuff doesn’t really matter.
But, if you are working on established codebases, doing interviews or looking to level up as a Dev — this is how to take maximum advantage of AI, without messing up your whole codebase.
On a different note…
We are entering the final quarter of 2025 – last chance to make your developer dreams come true!
Time to get serious about those goals.
As you can imagine, Bogdan and I are preparing something BIG coming up :)
Stay tuned,
Dragos
P.S. My calendar is pretty full for September… But if you are serious about leveling up, you might get lucky and find a spot for us to catch up. Book a call here, and hear you later!
