We’re living in an exciting time. AI has clearly demonstrated enormous capabilities and yetis not highly reliable or even predictable for providing correct or factual responses.

How can we benefit from AI as programmers? Should we shy away from using it or jump in with full faith? How can we benefit without being burned by it?

Those are the questions we will answer in this workshop, by way of practical examples and hands-on exercises.In this workshop we will,not by talking, but by walking through many examples, see the power and the perils of AI for application development. We will tear thing apart to understand where it gives us the most benefits, and in areas where it is not reliable. We will identify the techniques we can use to make the best use of AI. We will look at how we can practically use AI tools and, in areas, vibe coding, and how to make sure the results are reliable, maintainable, and dependable.

The overall goal is for us to be able to use the powerful tools to accelerate the development of applications, but in a way that we can still standby and sign off the applications we are ultimately responsible to deliver.

Course contents

Day 1:

The Power and Perils of using AI
Using AI to assist with existing code base
Working with Legacy Code: Reasoning, Identifying Issues using AI
Creating Tests using AI, for existing code

Day 2:

Using AI for software development
Green field development with AI
Rapid Prototyping with AI
Vibe Coding: Powers and Perils
Evaluating code generated by AI
Specification Driven Development

Tools:

The tools that will be used include, but are not limited to
ChatGPT
Claude
Copilot
Cursor
Gemini
IntelliJ IDEA
Junie
Perplexity
VSCode
Other (latest) tools

You will learn how to:

Use of AI for creating code
Use AI for identifying issues in existing code
Evaluate the quality of code created by AI
Use latest tools for Specification Driven Development
Evaluate the effectiveness of tools

What can you do after taking this course:

Make use of AI tools to create applications
Know when to use the tools and where to be cautious
Be able to articulate to your management where true productivity gains are
Avoid the fears and fallacies of tools by knowing their true power and limitations
Advocate the proper use of tools to truly gain from them

Details of Topics Covered:

Using AI for software development
Using AI for incremental development
Using tools from within IDEs
Working with single files to an entire code base
Refactoring code

Power and Perils of AI
Clearly look at areas where AI shines and solves our problems
Illustrate areas of deficiencies and highly problematic use cases

Using AI to work with legacy code or hard to maintain code
Look at the power of AI to deal with Cognitive Load
Explore the abilities of AI to analyze, reason, and document code
Be able to create tests for legacy code using AI

Identifying issues in code with the help of AI; leverage AI to detect
– Bugs
– logical errors
– maintainability concerns
– security issues
– obsolete code and find modern replacements

Evaluating the generated code
Analyze the quality of generated code
Identify issues in generated code
Setting up contexts and system prompts to steer the AI tools towards better quality
Creating a set of guidelines for AI tools
Setting up guard rails

Specification to Code tools to assist will full application development —State of the Art tools
Specification Driven Development
From spec to application
Evolving the applications as specifications change
Evaluating the quality
Looking at beyond development, moving to production and maintenance

The ways to benefit from Vibe coding
The power of vibe coding
The issues that arise from vibe coding
How to truly benefit from vibe coding

Hands on exercises and discussions throughout the sessions
Pair with developers and create multiple applications and solve different problems with the aid of AI

Target audience and prerequisites

This workshop is for you if you are:
– a programmer
– a hands-on architect
– technical team lead

About the instructor:

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., an instructional professor at the University of Houston, and creator of the dev2next and Arc of AI conferences.

He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.

Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at https://www.agiledeveloper.com.

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