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Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
151–160 of 657 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Experience depends on which FAANG it is. Amazon for example doesn't allow Claude Code or Codex so you are stuck with whatever internal tool they have Meta, despite competing with these, is open to let their devs use better off the shelf tools.
I work at aws and generally use Claude Opus 4.6 1M with Kiro (aws’s public competitor to Claude Code). My experience is positive. Kiro writes most of my code. My complaints: 1. Degraded quality over longer context window usage. I have to think about managing context and agents instead of focusing solely on the task. 2. It’s slow (when it’s “thinking”). Especially when it’s tasked with something simple (e.g., I could…
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Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you need to embed your best practices in your agent and keep and eye on it and refine it over time. Sincere question, how do beginners to the field (interns, juniors) do this when they don't have any best practices yet?
My advice for juniors is that it's too late to get entry level jobs for software engineering, but AI Automation engineering is just starting. Get a Claude code sub and build whatever you can imagine and focus on improving your own coding agent. Automate one more thing every day.
Software eng has always been automating repetitive decision making and processes. Code is just a series of steps computers/systems follow deterministically. Now we are automating the automation.
I don't necessarily disagree with your advice, but goodness, I don't look forward to using any of the low quality software in the next decade. I hope the shareholders remain happy.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#154[flagged]
Why exactly do you think people not doing that kind of work will be automated but your kind of work won't be automated? If AI really is all that, then whatever "special" thing you are doing will be automated as well.
I see variations of this non-stop these days, people who seem to be sure AI is going to automate everything right up to them.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you dont take a stand and refuse to clean their mess, aren't you part of the problem? No self respecting proponent of AI enabled development should suggest that the engineers generating the code are still not personally responsible for its quality.
Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make perform…
Unfortunately not many companies seem to require engineers to cycle between "feature" and "maintainability" work - hence those looking for the low-hanging fruits and know how to virtue signal seem to build their career on "features" while engineers passionate about correct solutions are left to pay for it while also labelled as "inefficient" by management. It's all a clown show, especially now with vibe-coding - no wonder we have big companies having had multiple incidents since vibing started taking off.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#156One thing I use Claude for is diagramming system architecture stuff in LateX and it’s great, I just describe what I am visualizing and kaboom I get perfect output I can paste into overleaf.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#157At work I mostly use claude code and chatgpt web for general queries, but cursor is probably the most popular in our company. I don’t think we are "cooked" but it definitely changes how development will be done.
I think the process of coming up with solutions will still be there but implementation is much faster now.
My observations:
1. What works for me is the usual, work iteratively on a plan then implement and review. The more constraints I put into the plan the better.
2. The biggest problem for me is LLM assuming something wrong and then having to steer it back or redoing the plan.
3. Exploring and onboarding to new codebases is much faster.
4. I don’t see the 10x speedup but I do see that now I can discard and prototype ideas quickly. For example I don’t spend 20-30 minutes writing something just to revert it if I don’t like how it looks or works.
5. Mental exhaustion when working on multiple different projects/agent sessions is real, so I tend to only have one. Having to constantly switch mental model of a problem is much more draining than the “old” way of working on a single problem. Basically the more I give in into vibing the harder it is to review and understand.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you dont take a stand and refuse to clean their mess, aren't you part of the problem? No self respecting proponent of AI enabled development should suggest that the engineers generating the code are still not personally responsible for its quality.
Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make perform…
Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams.
You’re much better off mixing both (quality work and product features).
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#159[flagged]
I have read comments about this on X, here, and other places, yet I have ever seen there be proof this is an actual productivity boost. I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it making making subtle mistakes, all the time. Are you really being more productive (let’s say 3x times more), or just feel that way because you are constantly prompting Claude? Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t buy it.
typical experience when only using one foundational model TBH. results are much better if you let different models review each other.
the bottleneck now is testing. that isn't going away anytime soon, it'll get much worse for a bit while models are good at churning code out that's slightly wrong or technically correct, but solving a different problem than intended; it's going to be a relatively short lived situation I'm afraid until the industry switches to most code being written for serving agents instead of humans.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#160I am forced to use it. They want us to only have code written by Claude. We are forced to use spec-kit for everything so every PR has hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of markdown comitted to the repo per ticket. I basically only review code now. It changes so fast it is impossible to have a stable mental model of the application. My job is now to goto meetings, go through the motions of reviewing thousands of lines of slop per day while sending thousands of lines of slop to others. Everything I liked about the job has been stolen from me, only things I disliked or was indifferent to are left.
If this is what the industry is now… this will be my last job in it.
Curse everyone involved with creating this nightmare.