Whilst there’s lots of stories of teams becoming hugely productive, there are also many stories of teams developing enormous technical debt, with them producing code that they don’t understand and can’t maintain.
Most experienced developers recognise that these tools can save an enormous amount of time, but they still need to be supervised, as if it they are a junior developer.
Personality, I like to think I’m in this experienced camp, in that I’m using AI to do lots of boring tasks, optimise code, help debug - but I don’t just let it do it’s thing unchecked. It’s a coding and time-saving tool, and something that can solve surprising complex problems, but it’s still not a full replacement for all of my thinking and experience.
But it really doesn’t take much to get on-board with to be honest, and it doesn’t necessarily require using these agent skills as such - maybe for doing very advanced stuff, but I’m finding that as long as my prompts have enough context, the code produced for Concrete systems, and others, tends to be pretty good.
My two suggestions would be:
- start using something like Gemini if you’re not already.
- Tell it things like ‘I am using Concrete CMS, version 9, and I would like to build a block to do XYZ, it should do A, keeping in mind B, and included C - please output the code for the files to make this block’.
- Tell it things like ‘I have a site built using X, I am getting this error message, Y, what should I check’.
- Tell it “I want an HTML form with these fields XYZ, please create one using Concrete CMS’s form helper functions”
- I particularly find it good for server tasks, so “I have this issue on my Ubuntu server, here is the message I am getting… what commands can I run to diagnose this”
- Or, “Please write me a bash script to automate running these commands, including a progress meter”
But what I am paying for is a product called Junie, it’s a Jetbrains product that can run within PHPStorm. It’s a pretty minimal cost per year, and you get a bunch of credits per month. Behind the scenes it’s just using Gemini (or Claude, or other AI models), but it’s been set up to understand PHP, but also the context of your projects.
Because Junie is more of an ‘agent’, you can tell it to do quite complex tasks and investigations, and it will both build and change your code. However, it will show you all the code changes it makes, and you can easily roll things back if it’s misunderstood or you’ve not given it enough detail. It’s quite interesting in that it will show you it’s ‘plan’, it’s thinking, and give you quite good summaries of the what and why.
And it will run terminal commands to help with the process, but it’s configured so you have to approve each one. But you can also put it into ‘Ask’ mode if you prefer, where it just gives advice, it won’t change any code. For Concrete, you can get it to build entire packages this way.
The small cost per year is completely trivial now to the dozens of hours of time I’ve saved.
I think my point is that it’s not actually a steep learning curve, and you don’t have to use these more custom agent skills - these are really for when you feel you’re wanting to do much bigger and complex tasks, and you need to give the AI better ‘context’ for how it should go it.
