2025-08-27 –, Potter Auditorium - Kenneth C Rowe Management Building
If you are a software engineer in 2025 you almost certainly have access to an AI Code assistant at work. This talk will go over how to get the most out of your AI assistant based upon my experience migrating Split's API wrapper code to use Harness endpoints after Split was acquired by Harness last summer. We will start with a brief overview of how LLM assistants work and then proceed to review what worked well and what didn't work well. We will go over how to design a good prompt, some examples of good prompts and bad prompts, and also go over how the order you make changes in matters for the LLM. Backtracking and knowing when to start over with your changes will also be discussed.
This talk will be about 15 - 20 slides focusing on AI code generators and how to make the best use of them in a real codebase. The first few slides will be an brief conceptual overview to how they work. Then there will be a section on my 'problem' so to speak - what I had to do to migrate the API endpoints. I'll explain that I was recently given access to an AI Code Assistant and wanted to try out leveraging it as much as I can.
The rest of the presentation I will go over then my findings from doing this - eg - what worked and what didn't work well. What prompts were successful and what prompts were duds. There were also situations where the order I did things in made a big difference.
Finally - I will also discuss reverting AI code changes and when to 'give up' on an AI path for a problem and try changing it up -either with a different prompt or trying to make some manual changes.
There won't be any live coding or demos. Should be some time at the end to answer questions from the audience.
Josh is a Senior Integration Advisor at Harness Software, where he helps customers implement and scale software for controlled deployments and experimentation. He has 15 years of experience as an Integration Engineer and Solutions Architect. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn State.