This article will be extraordinarily helpful to you: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

As someone with programming experience, I would personally recommend starting with Cursor. It has three modes: chat, composer, and agent, for varying degrees of “ask questions about my code” to “do the coding for me” so that you can experiment with different workflows. Since it’s an IDE and can import your settings from VSCode or similar it will also feel integrated/familiar.