This is a repost from the Software Mastery newsletter. If you like what you see, consider subscribing to get emails delivered right to your inbox!

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Software Mastery newsletter.

In this issue, I want to share two AI tools I use to boost my productivity as a software engineer.

When I began experimenting with AI chatbots and coding assistants after ChatGPT went viral, I wasn’t sold on using them for work.

In the early days, ChatGPT struggled to produce code snippets that ran correctly, and AI chatbot suggestions were not good.

A lot has changed in 2024, however, and I am thoroughly impressed with the improvements made in the past year.

I currently spend the bulk of my time using two AI tools:

1. Claude 3.5 Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock for generating code from natural language.

2. Amazon Q Developer for generating code in IntelliJ.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is an LLM you can chat with.

Released in June 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet excels at complex tasks such as coding and visual understanding.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s Artifacts feature displays certain types of output side-by-side!

I recently used Claude 3.5 Sonnet to create matplotlib graphs for some data I wanted to visualize for a demo at work.

Despite not remembering how to use this graphing library, I produced a correct and working graph in under 30 minutes by iterating on the code with the LLM.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is free, so consider trying it, even if you typically use ChatGPT!

Amazon Q Developer

Amazon Q Developer is an IDE plugin for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and IntelliJ.

With this plugin, you can chat with Amazon Q and get inline code suggestions without leaving your IDE.

The inline code suggestions are the best part!

The inline suggestions are particularly good at writing repetitive sections of code (e.g., creating POJOs, writing unit tests, wiring things up with dependency injection, etc.).

Usually, I either go with Amazon Q’s first suggestion or continue writing code myself until it figures out what I’m trying to do.

If you’re looking for a non-Amazon alternative, I’ve heard good things about GitHub Copilot.

Your Turn!

I hope this issue inspired you to experiment with AI tools to become a better software engineer.

With the recent rise of AI software engineers like Devin, I’ve seen aspiring and current software engineers getting nervous about losing their jobs.

I don’t believe these tools will make our jobs obsolete, but I do expect software engineers will need to learn to use AI to augment their abilities.

Do you have a favorite AI tool? Reply to this email or comment below to let me know!

Thanks for reading!

Sammy