How to use AI as an accelerator, not a crutch, with freelance engineer Ankur Tyagi [Podcast #186]
For this week's interview, I'm talking with Ankur Tyagi. He's a software engineer who's worked at multinational companies like Volvo, Barclays, and Accenture. He grew up in Pune, India and now lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.Ankur is a prolific contributor to freeCodeCamp's open source learning resources. He also runs DevTools Academy, where he blogs about emerging developer tools.
He shares tips for:
- How he uses AI tools to get more done as a dev but...
- He thinks leveraging AI is a skill any dev can learn, and we shouldn't worry about fewer dev jobs.
- How to run you own developer consultancy
- How writing programming tutorials can help you become a better engineer
Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out-of-the-box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at https://wixstudio.com.
Support also comes from the 10,889 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
News items:
→ freeCodeCamp launched its first chess course, taught by a software engineer with an international ELO rating of 2285. The beginner-level course covers strategic thinking, checkmate patterns, and includes a handbook and YouTube course. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/checkmate-patterns-in-chess-for-beginners
→ freeCodeCamp also released a comprehensive course on building an AI shopping agent. Software Engineer Ania Kubów teaches how to use Node, TypeScript, LangChain's LangGraph, Gemini, MongoDB, and other tools to create an autonomous agent. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/building-an-ai-powered-e-commerce-chat-assistant-with-mongodb/
→ Following Alibaba's Qwen LLM release, freeCodeCamp published a course on training it from scratch. Learn about its architecture, hyperparameters, Muon Optimization, RoPE Positional Embeddings, and more. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/code-and-train-qwen3-from-scratch/
→ freeCodeCamp also published a guide to System Design, covering scalability, the CAP Theorem, Caching & CDNs, Rate Limiting, and other key concepts. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-key-system-design-principles-behind-high-traffic-platforms-like-gaming-and-job-discovery/
→ Gamer's Nexus posted a 3-hour documentary on China's graphics chip usage for AI, which has faced multiple copyright claims. The video explores the legal and illegal acquisition of hardware in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Shenzhen, and Singapore. Search "gamers nexus GPU" if the link is down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkNBZeS1OHk
→ The maintainer of the Curl command-line tool discussed "AI slop" security issues, where LLMs hallucinate bugs that are then submitted by users. He notes that no LLM-generated issue has ever turned out to be a real security vulnerability, advising against using LLMs to rewrite issues or pull requests. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n2eDcRjSsk
This week's song of the week is 1991's Breather by UK band Chapterhouse. Absolute banger drums on this one. Link's in the description. Listen to it after the podcast. By the way if you're wondering, that's a sleeping cat on the cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGWaBJc1UrY Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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