NinjaHoldings Innovation & Technology Culture

Can you share an example of how you’re using AI in your day-to-day work and what problem it helps you solve?

We use AI pretty consistently in our day-to-day work efforts. Sometimes for smaller knowledge aggregating tasks such aggregating information about a particular framework or library. Sometimes for larger tasks such as big, tedious refactors when we know the solution we want, but don’t want to spend significant amounts of time manually updating files.

The biggest wins we’ve had so far are rapid prototyping and developer tooling. With the improvements in AI models, we’re now able to spin up additional tools that make our lives significantly faster and easier. We ended up spinning up an application relatively quickly that we use for team specific alerting and monitoring across several areas of our code base. This is something that would have required significantly more time to care and maintain without having something that could generate the bulk of the project for us.

How has your company supported you in experimenting with AI or building new AI-powered solutions?

Our company is fully onboard with our AI usage, providing accounts to developers it’s pretty hard to hit the cap on. We opened the floodgates relatively slowly during the initial roll-out, but now pretty much every developer is using AI tooling in some capacity. We have it running for immediate feedback on most pull requests and are encouraged to use it for analytics and to get ourselves unstuck when debugging/architecting.

That being said, we do encourage wise usage. Spinning up tons of agents and wasting tokens isn’t where we see most of our use. We typically try to keep it within the realm of raw prototyping to test if things work, or targeted research for solutions. Mostly just automating the annoying parts of software engineering away and speeding up our development cycle. It still has a bit of a way to go in terms of appropriate design patterns and architecture before we would be able to rely on it more for that.

How has working with AI changed the way you think about your own career or future growth?

A little bit. AI tools can do a lot, but they still make quite a few mistakes. I’m still happy with where I’m at in my software engineering career and I don’t think that will change. I’m still finding myself fixing issues or adding new functionality all the time. AI has been a tool that has helped accelerate what I was already doing.

It has shifted some things slightly. Mentorship is now much more important with the increase in development speed. Even though we’re faster, we want to ensure the solution we come up with is the correct one for us, not just what the model is recommending. It’s also changed the way I learn a bit. Things that required reading pages of documentation or several hours of browsing now usually get answered with a simple prompt, which has been a huge time saver.