AI in Development: the Worst Mentor, the Best Mentee

Using AI is now entirely unavoidable. Pandora’s box has been opened, and there’s no going back. Instead of trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, we need to start to identify the best way to work alongside it.

The worst way: “vibe coding”

Let’s start by identifying the ways we shouldn’t work with AI, and why.

Vibe coding, or prompting your way to a “working” app with little understanding of what is being generated, produces software that looks great on the surface, but dogwater under the hood. Without the understanding required to guide the AI, the codebase quickly accumulates horrible patterns. When things go bad, and they will, the only way to solve it is to continue the cycle and ask the AI to inject even more garbage into the project.

This approach leverages AI as your mentor, and that mentor is willing to solve it all for you without teaching you anything.

Vibes remove friction, and friction is where you learn

Skills, intuition, and permanent personal development are built through friction. This friction occurs when you make your own decisions, write your own code, and see for yourself where it breaks. Not only that, but the feeling you get when you finally solve that bug all on your own is what pushes you further into your development journey!

When AI robs you of that dopamine hit, you gradually stop chasing that feeling of growth as a developer. You stop forming your own opinions, ideas, and solutions to problems you encounter. You start to both defer to and grow reliant on AI.

What makes a great mentor, and why AI can’t do it

I am so lucky that in my career, I have had multiple mentors that have taught me so much.

My mentors never did the work for me. When I ran into an issue, they would instead offer up their potential solutions, links to documentation, and previous code examples from other projects that solved similar challenges. After that, they sent me off on my way to solve it myself.

Did I struggle for hours? Yes. Did I often have to ask more follow up questions? Absolutely. But those hours were the exact location where I became a better developer. The magic is in the gap between their guidance and my attempts.

After I solved these problems my way, their reviews brought about even more personal growth when they showed me far better ways to solve the problems I had just solved on my own.

AI cannot and will not ever be able to fulfill this role. It has no memory of your journey, no stake in your growth, and no ability to let you sit with discomfort long enough to learn from it. Ask AI how to do something and it will just… do it. The friction it removes is the exact friction you need to advance from a junior developer to a senior.

What makes a great mentee, and why AI does it perfectly

The exact reasons that make AI a horrible mentor lend itself to being a perfect mentee. AI is fantastic at taking a specific set of instructions and performing it at lightspeed.

However, those specific instructions can only be written by somebody who actually knows what they’re doing!

I liken the mentee approach to AI like cheat codes in a single player video game. In video games, cheat codes are earned. You put in the hours to experience the game for yourself. During that time, you learn the story, the mechanics, and become immersed in the world. Beating the game brings you a sense of accomplishment because you did it all on your own.

And guess what? Beating the game grants you access to cheat codes for your next playthrough! This time, you can skip long cutscenes you already witnessed, generate skill points, avoid grinding out smaller tasks and mobs, etc.

That is exactly how AI should fit into your workflow. Once you’ve put in the time, you essentially hire a junior developer to work for you. But if you punch in the cheat codes before you played the game on your own, you haven’t learned or experienced anything for yourself, and I can promise you it won’t stick.