Day 2 with AI assist

Eric Ford — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:18:27 +0000

The picture above is of a bishop-like piece having broken a prong off of an enemy bishop-like piece. Now that piece can no longer move in the direction of the missing prong.

I wrote this game (Prongs) for iOS and MacOS in Swift. It's in TestFlight now, but you can only play against a pretty mediocre game engine, not other humans. Let me know if you want to get on my TestFlight list.

So I embarked on creating a Django back end on Heroku so humans could play other humans. I really hadn't given the details much thought, but once I got into it it kind of ballooned on me.

I'm trying out Cursor as my AI assisted IDE. This morning, before coffee, I was getting annoyed by thinking of all of the details I would have to figure out, and then I remembered that I could just type in a prompt...

api function to start a new game

I got a pretty detailed bunch of Django code that would work for a game like Battleship. At the end of the pages of code, the assistant writes:

The game will be created in a "waiting" status until another player joins. Would you like me to add the endpoint for joining a game as well?

I'm almost 68. This is a very welcome new development at this point in my career. I was telling my wife Louise about it and she said, yeah, it's like having a sous chef. Perfect!

My first use of an AI code helper

Eric Ford — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 21:11:42 +0000

I'm learning Django (and Python), writing a back end for my chess-like game (called Prongs, pieces can get wounded as well as captured). The AI assistant called Cursor was one of the recommendations a friend of mine made. I needed additional fields attached to the built in User model. The AI gave me a very thorough suggestion/tutorial/implementation of a Profile model to connect to the User model. HOWEVER... it used a signal receiver to create the Profile when a User was saved. I wasn't familiar, but it reminded me of Notifications in iOS, which I use sparingly. I googled this and sure enough, signals should be used sparingly, as they can make unit testing and debugging unnecessarily complicated. It looks like get_or_create (which is called Lazy in Swift) makes more sense. So my take away is that AI saved me a bunch of googling to come up with a good summary for creating a one-to-one model to connect to the User model, but it needed reality checking, which involved almost as much googling. Still, it was very educational. It looks like a very useful skill that will be needed going forward by coders. This is also why AI is scary to me; we need to treat it like a junior dev and not blindly trust its recommendations.

DEV Community: Eric Ford

Day 2 with AI assist

My first use of an AI code helper