Michelangelo van Dam has created a two part blog post series on their experience with Junie, the agentic AI offering from JetBrains after watching this video from Trisha Gee. Michelangelo stated their objective was to create a website that they can use to publish their training courses and register for them - and Junie should do it all while pairing with him. Nice goal!

I'm a big fan of tutorials that you can follow along with and this one is no exception. The first step when working with Junie is to set up your guidelines.md. You can check out the documentation here, and some of the developer advocates have also contributed to a shared repo that has some Junie guidelines for different technologies. Michelangelo also notes this repository that he found which also contains guidance for a Spring Boot project.

Michelangelo tried to create the project guidelines using Junie in the instance, but it didn't work as expected and he got much better results when he created the Junie guidelines himself.

Next, Michelangelo walks us through the prompt they used to instruct Junie. I'm pleased to say that it's delightfully detailed because I've seen great results from Junie with detailed prompts just like this one. Michelangelo then let Junie crack on with the task in hand and proceeded to make a video detailing the process.

Michelangelo notes that it looked alright with some observations and drew a comparison with coding with junior developers in terms of the guidelines he created and likes that they are required and served value. With that, we're off to the second in this series of blog posts!