The present future of Sanity development

Simeon GriggsPrincipal Educator at Sanity

With its all-code configuration, thanks to AI-assisted development you can more rapidly configure a new Sanity Studio or integrate Sanity Client into your applications faster than low-code or no-code tools, which require hundreds of clicks in a browser to complete.

However without guidance AI tools will typically write the most average code possible. Among other problems, this can lead to a Sanity Studio configured only with the defaults and will not provide the best possible experience for your content creators.

While most AI tools understand the APIs Sanity makes available, they are unlikely to follow our opinionated best practices, which we have published over the years in guides and courses on Sanity Learn.

In this course, you'll be onboarded with several of the tools we use at Sanity, which we know will make your ability to ship ambitious projects faster and better.

This course covers how to:

• Write prompts with clear expectations for the best results
• Setup an AI-assistant specific code editor, Cursor
• Apply best-practice "rules" to guide the responses to your prompts
• Write prompts more efficiently with your voice
• Create and import placeholder content
• Rapidly build a front-end for your content

This course expects you to have some amount of understanding of development and some appreciation for Sanity, the Content Operating System.

In short, and among other things, Sanity offers a hosted backend—the Content Lake—and an all-code administration dashboard called Sanity Studio.

If you have any other questions, ask your favorite AI tool.

You don't even need to take this course. You could just open up any AI tool and ask it to do everything in one shot. This is most likely to lead to an impossible-to-maintain project that you don't fully understand and that your authors will not appreciate. Frustration will follow.

In this course, you’ll learn how to write prompts that will keep your project focused and achieve the best outcomes for both you as a developer maintaining your project and your authors using your Sanity Studio.

Getting from 0-80% has never been easier. Going beyond that still requires finesse.

As amazing as AI tooling is, it won't do the whole job for you. In terms of technical completeness, or even knowing what the "whole job" is, what its goals are or who it benefits!

It can’t—at this moment—understand human needs and translate them into technical solutions. That's your job. That's why we still need a human in the loop.

Whether you’re a seasoned programmer, a rookie developer, or a complete novice—you may have formed some opinion on AI tools. I’m a 10+ year web developer and recently reformed AI cynic who has seen the light that our futures involve AI tooling, and there’s no going back.

If you’re new to programming, welcome! There’s never been a better time to dip your toe in the water. AI tools will do all the work writing things you haven’t learned yet. You’ll get started faster than ever before and get to focus purely on the outcomes that you want—less so on the code.

Note that this course assumes that you already have some degree of developer knowledge. In terms of writing code or using code editing tools. The course shouldn’t be technically challenging because AI will be writing the majority of the code. But as a general rule, we advise you to ask the AI to explain the work it has done if anything is unclear.

On the other hand, if you have programming experience, I hope that this course will show you how to work faster and better with modern tools especially when constrained by opinionated rules.

You may also benefit from taking the Day One with Sanity Studio course to understand the Sanity platform conceptually. There's no better way to understand something than to get hands-on with it yourself.

Beyond the material presented in this course, I recommend reading the following valuable, hype-free content: