Mary Rose Cook

tl;dr: I’m offering coaching sessions where I teach professional engineers a smooth, stay-in-flow technique for AI-augmented programming.

All the nitty gritty tips and setup were very helpful.

— Andrew J.

Email me to sign up!.

Let the computer make you more productive

My first job after university was working at a software company on their huge Java desktop application. The architecture, complex and winding, made the code very hard to follow. Layer upon layer of indirection meant that trying to follow the flow of execution led to cognitive overload.

Fortunately, the company, though almost unflaggingly tight-fisted (bring your own cake on your birthday), bought IntelliJ for every developer. It had a feature, go to definition, where you could click on a method call and jump to the implementation. This made it possible to understand the byzantine code.

Which brings me to AI.

As programmers, we feel comfortable using tools to make us more productive. Generating code with AI is a natural next step in letting the computer help us.

Three times more productive

With code generation, building features goes much faster. I can be declarative (“add a button…”). I can get an implementation of a stock algorithm (“implement A* with this contract…”) I can zoom in when I need to (“wait, don’t duplicate that state…”).

Programming is a craft. Getting better is the slow process of accreting little techniques and intuition. But there are some core techniques you use all the time. For example, moving in small steps to keep the code compiling.

AI-augmented programming is also a craft. And there are also some core techniques. But they’re different. That one I described above isn’t even really a thing for AI-augmented programming. It’s too low level.

One core technique for AI-augmented programming, maybe the core technique - describe a feature, attach relevant code context, skim the code as it’s generated, let the agent fix lints and type errors, try out your new feature.

This isn’t a cobbled together set of manual steps. It’s an absorbing process where you stay in flow. And it’s a single technique that you’ll use all the time.

When building features, I estimate I’m three times more productive than I was a year ago.

I can teach you

I’m offering ninety minute sessions where I teach this feature-building technique. It’s one-on-one coaching for full-time, professional engineers. At the end of the session, you’ll have built a feature using this technique. And you’ll be set up to keep cranking out features forever.

As a bonus, I’ll teach you the literal one weird trick that makes programming with AI even faster. It’s there in plain sight, but hardly anyone does it. Here’s a hint - talking is faster than typing, but reading is faster than hearing.

Book a session

To book a session, email me at mary@maryrosecook.com.

The first person who signs up for a slot will pay the super-duper introductory price of $0. The second person will pay the merely super introductory price of $100. After that, the price is $300.

To help us get the most out of the time, include in your email -

• Which code editor and terminal you use.
• A project you’re working on and a feature you’d like to add to it in our session.

Talk soon!