Getting the most out of AI Coding

Welcome to Syntax. Today we got a quick episode for you on how to get the most out of AI coding. So these are a bunch of tips um that I've come up with myself. Scott added a whole bunch of his and I also reached out on Twitter, asked everybody, what are your best tips for getting the most out of AI coding, especially this is not just like prompt engineering, but basically how do you approach problems? How do you ask for things that you want? How do you supply

the information so that you get the best possible code out the other end? My name is West Boston developer from Canada with me as always, Mr. Scott Tinsky. How you doing, Scott? Hey, I'm doing good, man. I'm wearing a sweatshirt in the summer because I don't know about you, my air conditioning only cools like the bottom floor of our house and then like the top floor super warm. I think that's common, but like Yeah. Yeah, man. We'll have the air conditioning on and every morning we come downstairs and our our first floor is like freezing because the thermostat

there's a thermostat upstairs. So, I got to figure that out. I got to get something going here cuz this is like it's you know the upstairs you're sweating your your butt off and downstairs you're an ice cube. Drives me nuts that HVAC is not better. Like the amount of people that I I talk to that have brand new houses and they're like, "Yeah, it's kind of hot in this one room." It's like, can someone please figure out that just and the move honestly is these these little heat pumps? I've got one one right here, the mini splits

where like every room should just be able to you can turn it on. Like why are we cooling an entire house just to keep one thing is and like I'm in a I'm in the basement usually and I I've got foam stuffed in the vents cuz it's like so cold in our basement and then the top floor is just cooking. Yeah, I think that makes so much sense because Yeah, you'd just be cooling a single room. My I I have a since my office is detached, my office is attached to the garage, I have a mini

split inside of here. And it cools this room so quickly. I don't I mean, honestly, I don't I don't know deep into the energy side of things what's most efficient or whatever, but like it is it is very fast how fast it cools one specific room. I I would love that. Mine is busted right now. So, I have this like window shaker until the the fix one comes and like it's it's 25.9 in here right now. I had it down. No, this is the rest of the world uses

Celsius. Hold on. Okay, we have to convert it for these. That's very cold. I'm Americans. 25.9 Celsius to Fahrenheit is 78.62. So, I'm going to be dead by the end of this episode. So, let's get going before I get too hot here. Let's get going. Yes. And since we're talking about AI, your computer's going to get going, too. No, just kidding. Um, let's get into it. So, how do you get good results from AI when you're coding

with AI? Not not like not building AI into your apps, but using AI to cold to code, not too cold. Uh, how do you get good results there? So Wes, you want to kick it off with your scaffold tip? Yeah. So I think a lot of people think like these AI apps, you're just going to like one shot type in what you want. It's going to poop out an app the other end. It's going to be absolutely perfect. And make an app, no bugs, thanks. Yeah. Part of part of me has been like

like recently I've been like starting apps being like build an app that does X Y and Z. And I found myself having to create like a starter prompt being like, "Don't use Axios, don't use Express, don't use Tailwind 3, use Tailwind 4 instead." Don't use Tailwind at all. There's all these like things that I've had to say and then I find myself using like the next 20 minutes being like, "Don't use stop