Software Engineering

AI-assisted feature/design planning

Uses Cursor (Plan/Ask mode) as a thinking partner to discuss a feature or design, identify risks, simplify scope, break work into steps, and outline implementation approaches.

Why the human is still essential here

The engineer sets goals, provides context, and makes all final design/architecture decisions; AI supports exploration and structuring, not ownership of the solution.

How people use this

Design doc outline and alternatives

Given a feature brief, AI generates a design doc skeleton with multiple solution options and their tradeoffs for the engineer to refine.

Cursor (Plan mode) / Claude

Task breakdown into milestones

AI converts a high-level feature goal into a step-by-step implementation plan with milestones, dependencies, and rough estimates.

GitHub Copilot Chat / ChatGPT

Risk and failure-mode brainstorming

AI reviews the proposed approach and lists likely failure modes, operational risks, and mitigations to consider before coding.

Claude / ChatGPT

Community stories (1)

LinkedIn

My top AI tools for planning, edge cases, and PR reviews

In my previous post I listed the top 5 things I use AI for apart from writing code.
Reena Garg asked which AI tools I use for these tasks 🙏 — sharing my list👇


⭐️ Thinking partner for ideas Tool: Cursor (Plan/Ask mode) I use Plan mode to discuss a feature/design: “what am I missing?”, “what can go wrong?”, “what’s the simplest version?”, “how should I break this into steps?”, “How can we implement this?”,


⭐️ Finding edge cases Tool: Claude (Opus-4.6) I paste the context (API, flow, PR description) and ask it to list edge cases: retries, timeouts, caching, permissions, weird inputs, etc. Opus works great for any code related tasks.


⭐️ Code review before the code review Tool: CodeRabbit, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Review These tools are really great to get a review before asking for a human review. I use them on all of my PRs.


⭐️ Turning manual processes into clean steps Tool: ChatGPT / Claude This is usually a back-and-forth conversation until it becomes a clean checklist/runbook and sometimes an automation script.


⭐️ Writing clearer communication Tool: Any AI works, but I mostly use ChatGPT PR descriptions, Slack updates, incident notes — it helps turn messy thoughts into clear writing.


If you’re using any AI tools in a different way, please share — I’d love to learn and try them too 🙌

Cheers, Princi 👩🏻💻

PV
Princi VershwalOpen-source developer
Feb 23, 2026