AI Coding Best Practices: A Framework for Human-AI Collaboration

william — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 23:31:37 +0000

🚀 I’ve been a software developer for over 15 years.
Over the past year, I’ve been actively experimenting with AI-assisted coding — and the results are astonishing.

In this blog post, I summarize a workflow I refined over many weekends. It combines AI with TDD, prompt-driven planning, and best-practice constraints to create a highly productive loop.

⚡️ With the right setup, AI coding isn’t just 10× faster — it can sometimes feel like 1000× faster.

This is just a starting point. The world has already changed. The future is already here.
Let’s collaborate, improve this further, and shape how we build software together.

https://medium.com/@trees.william/ai-coding-best-practices-a-framework-for-human-ai-collaboration-dcc54cf4f01f

AI Menu Visualizer: Bringing Restaurant Menus to Life

william — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:45:16 +0000

AI Menu Visualizer: Bringing Restaurant Menus to Life

This post is my submission for DEV Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio.

What I Built

I created an AI Menu Visualizer that transforms static restaurant menus into vibrant visual experiences. Using Google's Gemini AI, the app can analyze both English and Chinese menu text, identify dish names, and generate photorealistic images for each dish. The key prompts include menu text extraction with structured JSON output and carefully crafted image generation prompts for appetizing, professional food photography.

Demo

Code is here: [https://github.com/williamhatch/ai-menu-visualizer]

Key Features:

Bilingual menu support (English & Chinese)
Real-time dish detection and image generation
Modern, responsive UI with Tailwind CSS
Progress tracking for multi-dish menus
Error handling and graceful fallbacks

My Experience

Building with Google AI Studio and Gemini was surprisingly intuitive. Key takeaways:

Multimodal Power: Gemini's ability to understand both text and images made menu analysis seamless. The model handles bilingual content exceptionally well.
Structured Output: Using the responseMimeType: "application/json" config ensures clean, parseable responses - crucial for production applications.
Image Generation Quality: Gemini's Imagen model produces consistently high-quality food photography, though prompting requires careful crafting for best results.
Developer Experience: The @google/genai SDK is well-documented and TypeScript-friendly, making integration straightforward.

The most challenging aspect was optimizing the image generation prompts to produce consistent, appetizing results across diverse cuisine types. The solution was to standardize the prompt structure with specific photography-focused language.

This project demonstrates how AI can enhance real-world dining experiences by bridging the gap between text menus and visual presentation.

DEV Community: william

AI Coding Best Practices: A Framework for Human-AI Collaboration

AI Menu Visualizer: Bringing Restaurant Menus to Life

AI Menu Visualizer: Bringing Restaurant Menus to Life

What I Built

Demo

My Experience