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 Links from our discussion: - Ankur's blog: https://www.devtoolsacademy.com/ - Ankur on X/Twitter: https://x.com/TheAnkurTyagi 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