Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

I am a developer with >25 of professional experience.

I am unable to get these things to do anything useful.

I’ve tried: different models, limiting my scope, breaking it down to small tasks, prompt “engineering”; and am still getting less than useless results.

I say less than useless, because I will then additionally waste time debugging or slamming my head against the wall the llm built before I abandon it and go to the official docs and find out the llm is suggesting an API access paradigm that became deprecated in the last major version update.

People on this site love to talk about “muh productivity!”, but always stop short of saying what they got from this productivity boost: pay raise, less time working; or what they built, what level of employment they are, or who they work for.

Are all of these posts just astroturfed?! I ask that sincerely.

Do you all just make “todo SPAs” at your employers?

I think they do some sort of like online tutorial and then they sort of like go through some sort of a course and then they get a job but they're only like doing like small pieces of like code writing themselves and I guess that's where like these editors help them some more.

You see more and more YC startups these days using TypeScript and Node as their stack, which is so strange to me.

But I agree with you. The AI stuff hasn't worked for me at all apart from some smarter autocomplete.

We are in the custom ERP space.

My experience is widely different than yours. I use Copilot extensively to explain aspects of codebases, generate documentation, and even fill in boilerplate code for automated tests. You need to provide the right context with the right system prompts, which needs some effort from your end, and you cannot expect perfect outputs.

In the end it's like any software developer tool: you need to learn how to use it, and when it makes sense to do so. That needs some continuous effort from your end to work your way up to a proficient level.

> People on this site love to talk about “muh productivity!”, but always stop short of saying what they got from this productivity boost: (...)

I don't understand what you're trying to say. I mean, have you ever asked that type of loaded question on discussions on googling for answers, going to Stack Overflow, or even posting questions on customer support pages?

But to answer your question, I spend far less time troubleshooting, reading code to build up context, and even googling for topics or browsing stack overflow. I was able to gather requirements, design whole systems, and put together proofs of concept requiring far less iterations than what I would otherwise have to go through. This means less drudge work, with all the benefits to quality of life that this brings.

Can you show me an example of successfully doing what you claim you do?