Learning not leaning: How developers can Accelerate their Learning with AI

Folks who’ve had “developer” on their job title for a few years will tell you: the hand-wringing over coding assistants feels awfully familiar. Intellisense, copy-paste… haven’t we been here before? Not quite. This latest wave of tools brings as many cons as it does pros - and that’s exactly why the real question isn’t if we should use them, but how. How do we leverage AI coding assistants in ways that actually make us better engineers? Better problem solvers? In this talk, I’ll share how we’ve been experimenting with AI inside the Umbraco CMS development team over the past year. Think mandatory Copilot-assisted sprints where devs are encouraged to ask “why” and “what if” instead of just “give me code.” I’ll walk through the practices that have turned coding assistants into learning assistants - and explain why AI can be such a powerful, low-stakes place to practice, explore, and even make mistakes.