With the pace of new AI coding tools coming out, it's hard to keep up to date on best practices/tools/techniques to get the best use out of them while also staying focused on my project.
How do you all discover improvements to your dev workflow in this wild AI world?
Any bloggers, YouTubers, subreddit, etc you recommend? Or just a summary of what you've currently tried and "settled" on at the moment?
I’ve been in the exact same spiral—new tool drops every Tuesday, I install it, it feels cool for twenty minutes, then I’m back to copy-pasting code like it’s 2019. The thing that finally broke the cycle for me was admitting that the tools weren’t the problem; my process was.
So I stopped reading launch posts and started eavesdropping. In practice that looks like:
- Keeping a muted Discord tab pinned for one competitor tool. I skim #feature-requests once a day—not for ideas, but to see which promises still aren’t keeping users happy. - Sorting Reddit threads by “controversial.” The bitter, down-voted rants are where the real friction lives. - On Show HN, I scroll straight to the third-level comments. That’s where the folks who actually tried the thing roast it in detail.
Those three habits give me a short, evergreen list of “this is still broken” problems. Everything else is noise.
From that list I distilled three rules I actually stick to:
1. *Context on purpose.* Before I ask the model for anything, I spend 90 seconds writing a tiny “context manifest”: file paths, line ranges, and a one-sentence goal. Sounds fussy, but it kills the “oh crap I forgot utils.py” loop. 2. *Tokens are cash.* I run with a token counter always visible. If I’m about to ship 1,200 tokens for a 3-line fix, I stop and pare it down like I’m on a 1990s data plan. The constraint hurts for a week, then it becomes a game. 3. *One-screen flow.* Editor left, prompt box right, diff viewer bottom. No browser tabs, no terminal hopping. Alt-tab was costing me more mental RAM than the actual coding.
It’s not sexy, and it definitely isn’t “AI-native,” but it’s the first workflow that hasn’t crumbled after a month. Maybe it’ll help you too.
[dead]