AI for Software Engineering

The Thin Line Between AI-Assisted Development and Vibe-Coding

I still fondly remember my first-hand experiences of using GitHub Copilot and Cursor. When I used GitHub Copilot for the first time (around 2023), I was a college student in my third year. It was an evening time, sitting alone in the HoD room, working on a project. I had applied for GitHub Education Pack and got access to GitHub Copilot through JetBrains Rider. It was those early days when Copilot was just autocompletions with specially-trained LLM called "Codex" and...

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How to Choose your Coding Assistants

Coding assistants like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Aider, OpenCode, Jetbrains AI, etc. have been making the news for the last few months. Yet, the choice of tools is a lot harder and limited for some of us than it seems.TL;DR: OpenCode > Claude Code > Aider > Copilot > *Disclaimer: Not all tools are created equal. The examples listed here might be invalid fairly soon as tools evolve fairly rapidly.You can plot the different types of coding...

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Level Up Code Quality with an AI Assistant

I've previously discussed how a world class developer experience is essential for a high-performing team. When teams lack such a setup, the most common response is a lack of time or buy-in from stakeholders to build these things. With AI coding assistants being readily available to most developers today, the engineering effort and the cost investment for the business are lessened, reducing the barrier to entry.This blog showcases an actual codebase that has not been actively maintained for over five...

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Patterns for AI-assisted Software Development

In the last blog (), we explored how AI is transforming software engineering beyond just writing code. Now, let’s look at what that means for teams and individuals in practice.For individuals leading and participating in teams that will build software with the assistance of AI tools, there are a few key patterns to keep in mind.With the AI ecosystem shifting weekly, C-level and VP-level stakeholders, who prioritise modular documentation, model pairing, scoped context, and tooling agility, will drive the highest...

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AI for Software Engineering, Not (only) Code Generation

Everyone has been talking about using coding assistants to aid with software delivery. There is more to delivering good software than writing code.Every software development project requires a couple of different activities from analysis (figure out what needs to be built) to planning to design and development (build) to test (ensure the right thing was built) to deploy (release software and ensure it runs correctly on production). Each of these roles require different skills and these skills have an opportunity...

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