From Coders to Conductors: How AI is Helping Us Build Smarter, Faster, and Better Software
By Matt Osbourne, Senior Developer – Seven Hills Technology
There’s a quiet revolution happening in software development, and it’s not about replacing developers. It’s about augmenting them.
At Seven Hills, we’ve been leaning into AI tooling to supercharge how we build. Our developers aren’t just writing code from scratch anymore, they’re collaborating with intelligent systems that accelerate the boring stuff, surface smarter patterns, and allow us to focus more time on the hard problems that actually move the needle.
But here’s the real story: it’s not plug-and-play magic.
To truly get value from these tools, our engineers have had to level up how they think, not just how they code. Prompting effectively, refining outputs, and striking the right balance between speed and quality is its own craft, and we’re getting better at it every day.
We’re learning how to fine-tune our prompts and process to get clean, reliable output without spinning our wheels.
🐇Too fast, and you waste time cleaning up poor outputs.
🐢Too slow, and you’re missing the point of automation.
🎯Just right, and you’re editing AI-generated code like a conductor fine-tuning a performance, guiding the system, enforcing best practices, and delivering high-quality work faster than ever before.
A real-world example:
We recently started a new greenfield API integration. Instead of brute-forcing our way through every endpoint, we took the time to architect and refactor the early pieces, dialing in structure and performance until we had a solid foundation. Once the patterns were clear and accessible to GitHub Copilot, something cool happened: with just a 1–2 sentence prompt, the tool began generating new endpoints, DTOs, and services that matched the structure we’d established. Our team shifted into reviewer mode, making minor tweaks and moving straight into testing. The time saved was huge. The quality? Still rock-solid.
This isn’t a one-time change. It’s an evolving discipline. As tooling improves, so does our process. And the better we get at using it, the more value we unlock, for us and for the people we build with.
We are diving into AI while being intentional about how we are using it. In its current state, we see it as a force multiplier, because great software still comes down to great decisions. And those are still made by people.
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