--- title: Field notes from a year of pairing with an AI, working alone description: A solo iOS developer shares 23 practical observations from a year of using an AI language model as a coding partner. Key rituals that stuck include: never... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/field-notes-from-a-year-of-pairing-with-an-ai-working-alone-rww31pnwr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Field notes from a year of pairing with an AI, working alone | daily.dev og:description: A solo iOS developer shares 23 practical observations from a year of using an AI language model as a coding partner. Key rituals that stuck include: never... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/field-notes-from-a-year-of-pairing-with-an-ai-working-alone-rww31pnwr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Rww31pnWr.png og:image:alt: Field notes from a year of pairing with an AI, working alone og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Field notes from a year of pairing with an AI, working alone **[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 13 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A solo iOS developer shares 23 practical observations from a year of using an AI language model as a coding partner. Key rituals that stuck include: never letting the model edit files directly, re-pasting context at session start, making small single-purpose requests, committing one accepted suggestion at a time, and writing load-bearing subsystems by hand. Three rituals that broke: letting the model touch files directly, asking for large code blocks, and assuming it remembered prior sessions. Notable failure modes include confident but outdated API suggestions, subtly wrong code (a memory leak from a strong capture in a retry closure), and tests that assert nothing meaningful. The author reflects that the work shifted from typing to judging, that easy tasks got faster while hard design decisions took the same time, and that a year of writing precise prompts unexpectedly improved communication with humans too. The honest open question: whether this makes you a better engineer or just a faster one. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Pairing With AI: A Practical Guide to Effective Developer-AI Collaboration](https://daily.dev/posts/pairing-with-ai-a-practical-guide-to-effective-developer-ai-collaboration-9a2fusl4m) · Softbinator · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI pair coding: Fast, but devs don't question the bot](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-pair-coding-fast-but-devs-don-t-question-the-bot-j5bubpnx5) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I Let AI Write My Code for 7 Days. Days 1–6 Were Magic. 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