2025/05/31 - Finally some usage

note

This will be an AI focused post. If you are also plagued by hype fatigue, I empathize.

TLDR;

I've finally started integrating AI solutions into my workflow. Kinda good? Slowly adapting, but adapting nonetheless.

Context

Now that more and more enterprises are starting to integrate generative and agentic tooling into their products and operations, my workplace has begun incentivizing the use of newer tools and models for every day development work. The general idea being that if we want to secure these workloads and remain competitive in today's market, our people need to be knowledgeable regarding patterns, usage, and risks.

Okay, that's nice, and?

Being too cheap to dish out the cash for more monthly subscriptions, this means I finally have gotten access to play around with some tooling outside of free tiers. Although I had already replaced my Stack Overflow searches and Google visits with Claude Desktop and ChatGPT, this meant I suddenly had access to some API keys for my own integration pleasures.

The Tech

Here's generally what my AI stack has morphed into during the past couple of months:

What's the setup?

In most development work, CodeCompanion is my goto. Having it configured in Neovim without any inline completion, yet the :CodeCompanionChat command giving me instant access to an LLM chat window with codebase context has been great. This is currently hooked up to Gemini (which is unfortunately a bit verbose in its answers) and speeds up my workflow by reducing the amount of browser navigation I require.

The other nice improvement is frequent usage of sigoden/aichat directly from the CLI with an API key. My pattern tends to be:

aichat "..., be brief" | glow

This gives me a pleasant little genie in a bottle that doesn't mess around and answers me in short rendered markown blurbs. Although a simple approach, this has replaced a fair bit of my documentation lookups while in deeper focus.

The newest addition

I've started warming up a bit to Windsurf and the agentic Cascade mode that comes baked into this VSCode clone. Having to run some form of vim emulation to get my motions to work drives me insane, yet using the editor for the occasional exploratory refactor has been useful.

I recently enjoyed fleshing out a Slack notification testing endpoint with it and was impressed to see that the agent managed to grasp existing patterns and slotted the implementation neatly with a rather decent OpenAPI spec and backend handlers/logic. Some of the glue was messy, yet it didn't hallucinate any dependencies or data layer invocations.

Thoughts

Although I haven't found these tools to be world changing just yet, some of the speedup has been nice. Leaving more time for my dumb neurons to think in higher abstractions instead of naming variables (badly). Maybe the skill atrophy won't be too harsh.