As a principal engineer, a lot of my time is spent outside and around the code. Most conversations about AI in software focus on coding - implementation, generating tests, reviewing pull requests. And yes, I use it for all of that. But some of AI’s most valuable benefits for me are the ones that get less attention, because they’re in the parts of my job that are not about code at all.
Here are the four places AI has become indispensable in my workflow.
Data analysis
I write a lot of throwaway SQL. Not the kind that gets shipped and reviewed, but the kind that I use to answer a question I have at a point in time. AI writes this for me far faster than I can handcraft it. Give it the schema, describe the question, and it produces a query I’d otherwise spend twenty minutes getting right.
More importantly, it understands the data. It can read a table’s structure and a data set faster than I can, spot the shape of things, and point me at what matters. And when it comes to logs or large files of text - the stuff that would take me hours to scroll through - AI reads them in seconds, gives me the insights I need and if I need to dig deeper or see the data for myself, I can with relative easy. This has probably saved me hours every time I need to do some analysis.
Project status data gathering
Recalling what I actually did over the past week used to mean scrolling through chat messages, pages I’d written, and calendar events, trying to reconstruct what I did and what happened. AI can gather all of that in moments and collate it into something coherent. What took me an hour of mental archaeology now takes me a few minutes of verification and editing.
First draft writing
I regularly write technical strategies, high-level explainers, and other documents that require real writing. I often hit the blank canvas problem. Staring at an empty page hard and it can take me a while to get into the swing of things. Sometimes hours if I get pulled into other things in the interim. AI gets me past it instantly. I give it a prompt with the points I want to make, it writes, and I edit heavily. I often do heavy editing, sometimes re-writing entire sections in my own words or deleting large parts of a document that was just too hyperbolic or sycophantic. I still end up with a document that is mine but I get there much faster without having to start from scratch.
Summarising chats and tracking work
Ever had the retro item “we need to write better ticket descriptions”? AI solves that retro item once and for all. It can read a chat thread and summarise it, and it can read the code too and write a spec out of both. We are talking here about ad-hoc ticketing, help threads, queries or operational work needed for maintenance. These things used to get lost in history, a lot of the times if a ticket was raised it would have next to no context
Most importantly, none of these things replace our craft. They make us better as engineers because they allow us to focus on the important technical things instead.