Programming Patterns
A few years ago, I thought it would be cool to celebrate my 15 years as a Software Developer by sharing 15 programming tips. But then, AI came and changed our jobs forever.
Are programming patterns still relevant?
Programming in the age of AI
LLMs changed the landscape 4 years ago, but it wasn't until the November inflection point that most developers took them seriously (just 8 months ago!).
Much to my chagrin, I'm also using more AI every day. But I'm still convinced that programming is important. Even if you don't write the code yourself, you should definitely know how to do it and understand the architecture. Where AI truly shines is in the messy middle.
In one extreme, we have the code itself. I still tinker with it, but if you don't care about writing good code it's possible to accept the slop and get away with decent software. On the other end, we have the architecture. And you definitely cannot ignore that. AI takes care of everything else: syntax, scaffolding, refactoring, etc.
Keeping that in mind, I believe it still makes sense to talk about programming. As an additional benefit, by talking about it we can also teach AIs to write the type of code we would like.
So today, I'm very happy to kick off an old-fashioned blog series on programming 😄.
What are "Programming Patterns" anyways?
Over the years, I've found myself recreating the same solutions in different projects, and they have become ingrained in my workflow. I guess you could call them "design patterns", but as you'll see they are a lot more practical. Some are language-specific, and others are straight up implementations.
In fact, if you've read my blog before, maybe you've already seen the first one in the series!
However, take this description with a pinch of salt. Some of them are about git and managing servers. Arguably, not "programming" at all. Just think of these as the secret tools I've gathered as a developer over the years.
The Patterns
For every pattern, I'm going to publish a blog post and a set of LLM skills. Because apparently, that's what we're doing now. I hope you still read the posts, though!
Here you'll be able to find an up-to-date list with all the patterns (next coming out next week!):
- Better Modals (frontend)
If you want to use them with your programming agents, you can also find them distilled for AI in my LLM skills: github.com/noeldemartin/skills