TL;DR

Happy New Year! This post will be my summary and notes on how I use AI daily as a software developer, or maybe it will be better to name it proof of concept or demo developer ;) I will focus only on the tools that help me write/generate the code.

PS> I’m not an AI expert; I’m only a user of AI tools, which are helping me with the software development process.

Tools

GitHub Copilot

  • I use the chat from VS Code and Rider with the context of the file (as I see we can change the scope to ‘repository’ so the Copilot team is working on the features), but daily I generate some ‘hints’ review them and copy&paste into the solution. The size of the generated code is mostly 10-20 lines of code, simple methods, mappings or library executions.
  • I’m also testing the GitHub Copilot with the feature without access to the public code (GitHub Public repositories) and the AI can’t help me with all my questions. I can see how important samples and code is for the AI.
  • Copilot Chat is perfect in the case of generating simple small solutions.

Bolt

For me, there is only one leader as a frontend tool: Bolt. My focus is to build a page from scratch; with one or two prompts, I got a nice start-solution based on the bolt-vite-react boilerplate which I can extend, build on my own or trash. Look at the picture, based on the simple prompt I can generate a nice starting point.

From

  • A different tool in comparison to Copilot Chat, is more like Workspaces or Aider. Prompt to see the result - we can review the code or check the live preview - amazing!
  • Perfect for green field projects to speed up development.
  • Nice UI as the first result. For a pet project perfect!
  • Maybe, because I use a free plan I can’t work in my repository context, to prompt and commit code to my repository - if you know how please let me know.

For me all is perfect:

  • Code with TypeScript.
  • AI generates components, and a well-written project structure.
  • For my demo and pet projects the result is fantastic.

Side notes:

  • I use a free version (with limited tokens). From time to time it is not enough… to try the tool and check if meets your expectations it is perfect.

Aider

  • Developer assistant (Junior Developer) in your team. Open CMD run aider command, ask for ‘feature’, link the files and get the commit.
  • Review and fix the commit - Junior is not always perfect ;) Commit your fix, or remove a stupid implementation and try one more time. (yes, there is auto-commit after prompt)
  • Aider is only a CMD tool, you need to connect the AI - today I’m testing claude.ai (20$ per month paid licence + Aider is using the API - so I needed to pay in front of example 10$ with was for 3 months of my with AI development )

Picture 1.1 Aider. Prompt, attach the file: Picture 1.1

Picture 1.2 Aider. Code generation: Picture 1.2

GitHub Copilot Workspace

  • Similar to the Aider, but we have more control from the task (Picture 2.3 step 1) to plan (Picture 2.3 step 2).
  • I asked about both cases to create a new endpoint for my Asp.Net Minimal API.
  • With Workspace we can use only AI provided by GitHub, today I don’t see the option to change the model to Claude for example.

Picture 2.1 Copilot Workspace. Prompt with Brainstorm: Picture 2.1

Picture 2.1 Copilot Workspace. Plan and generated code: Picture 2.2

Picture 2.3 Copilot Workspace. Full flow: Picture 2.3 PS> As you can see on the screen, my drawing/UI skills are not perfect :)

Fails and issues

I wanted to use AI to rewrite a SPA application with around 1k lines of code from the Vanilla.JS framework into a React.JS App. The application contains 3-5 pages/screens with different modes.

During 2024, I asked different AIs, like GitHub Copilot and Google Gemini, to rewrite the solution. Finally, I used Aider and generated code screen by screen, page by page, with manual improvement and fixed suggested implementation. For the generated frontend business code, I generated a nice UI via Bolt.

Picture 3.1 My favorite answer from Gemini AI to generate CSS styles for my project: Picture 3.1

Picture 3.2 GitHub Copilot without public code access: Picture 3.2

What next?

  • I want to keep using Aider but try Google Gemini to solve my problems.
  • I like to work with Aider - creating features one by one (commit by commit) - the tool will be my favourite in 2025.