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Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

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Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#161

Post by wg0 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #10

I work at a FAANG. Professionally, I have had almost no luck with it, outside of summarizing design docs or literally just finding something in the code that a simple search might not find: such is this team's code that does X? I am yet to successfully prompt it and get a working commit. Further, I will add that I also don't know any ICs personally who have successfully used it. Though, there's endless posts of peopl…

This checks out logical speaking.

The FANG code basis are very large and date back years might not necessarily be using open source frameworks rather in house libraries and frameworks none of which are certainly available to Anthropic or OpenAI hence these models have zero visibility into them.

Therefore combined with the fact that these are not reasoning or thinking machines rather probabilistic (image/text) generators, they can't generate what they haven't seen.

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#162

Post by turlockmike »

AstroBen wrote: post #137
turlockmike wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, aspects of that will be automated, but two things will remain: Intent and Judgement. Building AI systems will be about determining the right thing to build and ensuring your AI system fully understands it. For example, I have a trading bot that trades. I spent a lot of time on refining the optimization statement for the AI. If you give it the wrong goal or there's any ambiguity, it can go down the w…

You're trusting AI to trade with your real money?

Not a lot of money because I haven't built enough confidence but yes it's the ultimate test of can it do economically useful work

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#163

Post by makerofthings »

I am required to maximise my use of AI at work and so I do. It's good enough at simple, common stuff. Throw up a web page, write some python, munge some data in C++, all great as long as the scale is small. If I'm working on anything cutting edge or niche (which I usually am) then it makes a huge mess and wastes my time. If you have a really big code base in the ~50million loc range then it makes a huge mess.

I really liked writing code, so this is all a big negative for me. I genuinely think we have built a really bad thing, that will take away jobs that people love and leave nothing but mediocrity. This thing is going to make the human race dumber and it's going to hold us back.

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#164

Post by baq »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #102
turlockmike wrote: post #96

[flagged]

> 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?

it's the easiest as it's ever been to get started in a foreign code base: start up the agent and ask questions. more or less instant answers, basically zero confabulations nowadays.

...but since it's so easy to deliver stuff without actually knowing anything, learning means putting in the effort to resist temptation and use the agent as a teaching aid instead of an intern savant.

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#165

Post by mattmanser »

gnerd00 wrote: post #18

FAANG colleague writes this week -- "I am currently being eaten alive by AI stuff for my non-( foss-project ) work. I spend most of my day slogging through AI generated comments and code trying to figure out what is good, not good, or needs my help to become good. Or I'm trying to figure out how to prompt the tools to do what I want them to do" This fellow is one of the few mature software engineers I have ever met w…

I must admit I'm totally lost on what this is trying to communicate.

What is "non-(foss-project) work".

Is this person saying AI is bad, because it's generating so much, or good, because they're using it?

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#166

Post by mrmansano »

nzoschke wrote: post #143

It’s going very well. Experience level: very senior, programming for 25 years, have managed platform teams at Heroku and Segment. Project type: new startup started Jan ‘26 at https://housecat.com . Pitch is “dev tools for non developers” Team size: currently 2. Stack: Go, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, Postgres, SQLite, GCP and exe.dev. Claude code and other coding harnesses fully replaced typing code in an IDE over the past y…

Interesting premise for your product. Hope you find success! From a dev perspective I feel your website pass a vibe more of a "OpenClaw you can trust" than "dev tool for non developers". Is that right? Or am I misreading the idea?

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#167

Post by Karrot_Kream »

AstroBen wrote: post #137
turlockmike wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, aspects of that will be automated, but two things will remain: Intent and Judgement. Building AI systems will be about determining the right thing to build and ensuring your AI system fully understands it. For example, I have a trading bot that trades. I spent a lot of time on refining the optimization statement for the AI. If you give it the wrong goal or there's any ambiguity, it can go down the w…

You're trusting AI to trade with your real money?

I mean, real algo trading shops use "AI" to do it all the time, they just don't use LLMs. While I'm not the GP I think the idea they're trying to express is that the nuts and bolts of structuring programs is going away. The engineer of today, according to this claim and similar to Karpathy's Software 3.0 idea, structures their work in terms of blocks of intelligence and uses these blocks to construct programs. Nothing stopping Claude Code or another LLM coding harness from generating the scaffolding for a time-series model and then letting the author refactor the model and its hyperparameters as needed to achieve fit.

Though I don't know of any algo trading shop that relies purely on algorithms as market regimes change frequently and the alpha of new edge ends up getting competed away frequently.

(And personally I'm a believer of the jagged intelligence theory of LLMs where there's some tasks that LLMs are great at and other tasks that they'll continue being idiotic at for a while, and think there's plenty of work left for nuts and bolts program writers to do.)

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#168

Post by mentalgear »

I use it mostly to explore the information space of architectural problems, but the constant "positive engagement feedback" (first line of each generation "brilliant insight") start being deeply insincere and also false by regularly claiming "this is the mathematically best solution - ready to implement ?" only that it isn't when considering it truly.

I have moved away from using an LLM now before having figured out the specifications, otherwise it's very very risky to go down a wrong rabbit hole the LLM seduced you into via its "user engagement" training.

Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

#170

Post by oh_my_goodness »

ramraj07 wrote: post #75
hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #13

It has made my job an awful slog, and my personal projects move faster. At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the main project. It also included a…

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.

"aren't you part of the problem?"

Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?

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