How a productive engineer uses AI at work (18 practical tips)
Most engineers use AI randomly and stay slow. This article shows how to design AI-first workflows to eliminate busywork, learn just in time, and multiply impact (18 practical tips)
For the last week, I’ve been thinking about how to get more output per hour of work. More impact from the same effort.
I realized we are all clear that coding with AI in our IDE is a huge boost. We also know that AI does not replace judgment. It magnifies whatever judgment you already have. When the thinking is sloppy, AI makes mistakes faster. When the thinking is clear, AI compresses weeks of work into days.
But it’s not only about coding and IDEs. There are more things in our software engineering jobs besides writing code.
In this post, I cover all the ways I could think of for an engineer to become more productive in their day-to-day work. Let’s start!
In this post, you’ll learn
How to use AI to increase output without lowering quality
Where AI actually saves time in day-to-day engineering work
How to turn invisible work into visible career leverage
Why workflow design matters more than raw technical skill