Is AI Assisted Development "Slowing Us Down"

This idea of context engineering is a missing piece to this whole AI assisted coding thing that people need to scrub up on. So, this is the part where I was going to riff off of context engineering. Have you heard about context engineering at all? No. And in fact, I I commented on someone on LinkedIn just now. They they put a post out saying that it's proven that AI assisted coding is actually slowing developers down. And I responded to that because of course I would and said it would be interesting to see what methodology those developers employed to say they're doing AI assisted development because like a lot of people myself included when I approached AI assisted development I kind of went in thinking right how can it help me write code and autocomp completion was great it's a great little start because it was is helping me write code but as we start to get into the more agentic stuff. We needed a new approach to write code using AI. We kind of got into taskmaster stuff where you create your product requirements document. You develop a list of tasks based on that which is still very very relevant. what it lacked, which is this idea of memories and and you've got the Gemini files and you've got the clawed files, files that you pepper throughout your codebase to sort of give it context as to what it's working on and what it should do and how it should format things. So, you're constructing a network of rules that um can help the AI write code. And then this idea of context engineering is coming into play which is basically is there's a bunch of files that tell the AI how to format stuff. You just need a bunch of files that you can reference to say implement this task implement this feature using these rules. You're also giving it documentation that it should should search as well. Especially because LLMs are so behind on documentation. I still have a hard time getting LLMs to implement Tailwind 4 libraries. It's still trying to spin up things in Tailwind 3. So, I need to tell it to use Tailwind 4. There's um an MCP called Context 7, which you can get the most up-to-date documentation for these libraries on there. And then all this to say, this idea of context engineering is becoming the way to to to AI code. We're becoming the co-pilots and we're giving them all the information they need to be able to do what they need to do. And um I want to share it, but not just yet because it's not complete. But I completely built my personal website using AI. I used Manis to do research on me. So it went off to my YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn on my company, Jupiter and the Draft. did all this research and pulled together a wireframe and a plan for this website. I then built like a CMS powered website with it and it's been brought together completely with AI assisted development and the to bring it back to context engineering. The actual coding part of it was so much quicker. I spent hours on stream trying to learn taskmaster and ultimately I was starting to feel like you know it's better if I just have files here or there. I was doing context engineering without it being defi. A lot of people were doing this. I'm not saying I'm trailblazing here, but like a lot of people were doing context engineering without actually doing context engineering. So the fact that I did all of this in probably less than a day. The actual development was actually really straightforward and I'm really really enjoying context engineering and the way we develop is completely shifting worrying less about the actual nittygritty of the code and just being more highle thinking being more of a manager being more of a shepherd to the AI. The only thing that wasn't vibed was almost it was almost AI done was the actual my actual profile picture. I generated it and I think the profile picture looked fine but the quality of the image wasn't there. So I just snapped a photo on this camera and then did all that. But that's the only thing I look forward to sharing this whole you know this this website with you. But like um yeah this idea of context engineering is a real the the missing piece I think personally to this whole AI assisted coding thing that um people need to scrub up on. This is part of a larger conversation on my show Command AI which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.