Senior Developer AI Upskilling
Balancing power and control
AI and LLMs landed like a revolution, promising massive improvements and a paradigm shift in the way we develop software.
But the magic of Vibe Coding clashes against a simple objection: who’s going to maintain the code? And when long-term ownership and accountability are involved, then a more sensible approach is required. Balancing the possibilities offered by new tools with the need to stay on top of a mission-critical codebase.
Balancing power and control
Professional software development will need to reinvent itself, leveraging the power of new and quickly evolving tools, while providing a robust and reliable service to our customers. In an odd twist, many old-school techniques are instrumental in the new landscape.
- Domain-Driven Design provides tools to decompose complex models into more manageable chunks, aligning with the constraints of the context window.
- Behaviour-Driven Development provides clear support to describe the desired behaviour without the ambiguities of natural language.
- Test-Driven Development gives stability to a codebase that grows faster and can quickly start oscillating without proper anchoring.
Two keywords may describe the current challenge: control and discipline. Like driving a sports car on a slippery, windy road, the power of the engine can put you in danger if you don’t feel the tyres. Modern professional software development is about controlling the power of the new tools. Discipline is about our ability to resist temptations: keeping the increment small enough to be manageable, cleaning up the unavoidable missteps and so on.
The result is a new system: a different team organisation (probably smaller and with more seniority), a different workflow, and different relationships with the domain experts.
Our training offer
Our new titles combine the experience of software craft with the power of new AI-Augmented tools to build robust approaches to professional software development.
– AI Assistants for Your Team with Uberto Barbini is a three-session journey into leveraging the power of coding assistants while maintaining control over your workflow and codebase.