Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 209 posts

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#171

Post by ai_assisted_dev »

moltar wrote: post #160
ai_assisted_dev wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I land most of my clients by maintaining my blog and a github with open source projects. I have build a lot of general purpose MCPs and quite some tools, which are all written by Claude (3.5 and 4.0) and now GPT5. On my blog I just blog together with AI. It sounds silly, yes... I don't want to share it here publicly, but it looks good and it gets me people in my inbox (email/linkedin). So I post on LinkedIn & Reddit,…

I am glad to hear that the content still works. I thought ChatGPT would kill all SEO and content marketing.

I usually do write the whole article. Maybe I spend an hour on it. Sometimes even much longer. And then I have a way of rewriting it with AI to improve the writing style. Which I then proof read and keep improving. I do this because reading back what I wrote feels even worse than listening to my own voice. It just gives me a visceral reaction lol. But yes this worked. I always wanted to write and blog prior to AI, but my aversion to proofreading my own writing stopped me from doing so over a decade (dozen actual genuine attempts).

Google does not mind. I rank quite highly for some niche keyword on LLM programming.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#172

Post by ai_assisted_dev »

ai_assisted_dev wrote: post #129
englishrookie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing your setup (LLM model, IDE, best practices)? Personally, I'm struggling to get value out of Continue.dev in VSCode (using Gemini 2.0 Flash by default, with the option to switch to more advanced models). I still revert to pasting code into ChatGPT chat window (using the website), frequently. Are you using agentic features, given that you have not just one but two PMs?

The biggest tip I can give you is to stay in the framework you are most convenient in, and have the most experience. Start building stuff the way you would by yourself, but then start delegating the repetitive tasks to an agent. My best recommendations would be using Cursor in Agent mode, and switching to VScode in Agent mode when your credits with Cursor run out. The reason why I like Cursor more is because of the C…

Also to add another point is that if you felt like an agent did not help you correctly, or way overshot, did too much edits, etc. Go back to the original prompt, rephrase it - sometimes you need 1-2 times. Sometimes the model just don't work for your workflow. It can become quite delicate.

One of the bigger things is when you introduced some bug, start working backwards with the agent, simplifying whatever you build to its bare necessities, and the moment it dissapears, start a new chat, and build it back up to what it was before (in the desired non-bugged state). This often works if you then also switch to a completely different model.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#173

Post by caleblloyd »

I am the Product/Eng Lead and a Co-founder of a company formed ~1 year ago building AI-native developer tooling for Platform Engineers. Have been able to iterate very quickly through PoC phases and get initial feedback on ideas quicker. For features that make it into production code, we do have to spend some time re-working them with more formal architectures to remove "AI slop" but we are also able to try more things out to figure out what to move forward, so I feel like it is a net gain.

Part of "AI-native" means being able to really focus on how we can improve our Product to lessen upfront burden on users and increase time-to-value. For the first time in a while, I feel like there is more skill needed in building an app than just doing MVC + REST + Validation + Form Building. We focus on the minimum data needed for each form upfront from our users, then stream things like Titles, Icons, Descriptions, etc in a progressive manner to reduce form filling burden on our users.

I've been able to hire and mentor Engineers at a quicker pace than in the past. We have a mix of newer and seasoned Engineers. The newer Engineers seem to be learning far quicker with focused mentoring on how to effectively prompt AI for code discovery, scaffolding, and writing tests. Seasoned Engineers are able to work across the stack to understand and contribute to dependencies outside of their main focus because it's easier to understand the codebase and work across languages/frameworks.

AI in development has proven useful for some things, but thoughtful architecture with skilled personnel driving always seems to get the best results. Our vision from our product is the same, we want it to be a force multiplier for skilled Platform Engineers.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#174

Post by binary132 »

al_borland wrote: post #104

Our last CIO bought into all the AI hype early on and pushed it hard, before we were even allowed to use it. It was an odd time. We’d go to a town hall and get told that AI is going to change everything, and then get an email telling us we weren’t allowed to use it. Now that we can use Copilot, we have a new CIO and I don’t hear about it so much. There is still some AI hype, but it’s more about how it’s being used in…

Some people really bought into the meme where AI was going to replace everyone and only those aggressively pimping it would be able to keep their jobs.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#175

Post by jimbokun »

projectazorian wrote: post #167
chrisco255 wrote: post #9

AI does 0% of my work and we are actively hiring. As someone mentioned on another AI thread, if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc? AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptica…

> if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc? Because those projects are mature and have a very high bar for contributions, so aren't a good fit for AI? Opening a PR on Linux is very different from opening a PR on a company's non-critical-path CRUD service.

I suspect the vast majority of day to day software development is new features and maintenance on large projects, rather than greenfield development.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#176

Post by jimbokun »

antisol wrote: post #78
hoherd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously this. Doing code reviews on LLM created code is so frustrating. If the code was submitted by a junior engineer I could get on zoom with them and educate them, which would make them a better team mate, advance their career goals, and make the world slightly better. With AI created code the review process is a series of tiny struggles to dig up out of the hole the LLM created and get back to baseline code qua…

Ha! Not just "the next PR", in my experience about 30% of the time you tell it "hey this slop you gave me is horribly broken because ", and it says "you're absolutely right! I totally 100% understand the problem now, and I'll totally 100% fix that for you right now!", and then proceeds to deliver exactly the same broken slop it game me before.

Interesting, isn’t it?

It knows that the apologetic tone and acknowledging understanding of your critique is the most probable response for it to generate. But that’s very different from actually understanding how it should change the code.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#177

Post by jimbokun »

pram wrote: post #10

We are still hiring engineers. Everyone has a paid Cursor sub, and some people use Claude Code. We also have Claude in GitHub doing automatic PRs. It’s mostly seen as a force multiplier. Our platform is all Java+Spring so obviously the LLMs are particularly effective because it’s so common. It hasn’t really replaced anyone though, also because it’s Java+Spring so most of our platform is an enormous incomprehensible m…

I work on a lot of Java Spring code.

Agreed that it’s inherently a bunch of barely comprehensible slop that the AI slop probably fits right in, lol.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#178

Post by jimbokun »

torginus wrote: post #33
827a wrote: post #15

Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage". My organization…

> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore. I wonder if we are going to pay for that, as a society. The number of times I went there, asking some tricky question about a framework, and have the actual author or one of the core contributors answer me was astonishing.

We are losing the next generation of content to train future AIs on.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#179

Post by jimbokun »

nicbou wrote: post #84
torginus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore. I wonder if we are going to pay for that, as a society. The number of times I went there, asking some tricky question about a framework, and have the actual author or one of the core contributors answer me was astonishing.

As I wrote in a root comment, it’s decimating the traffic of informational websites. We will lose a lot of those websites that produced high-effort, simple-conclusion information. Who will bother with in-depth reviews if someone else gets the sale? Who will patiently answer questions if no one asks anymore? I think that a certain kind of craftsmanship will be lost.

AI companies are eating their seed corn.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#180

Post by jimbokun »

kldg wrote: post #114
torginus wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, SO had many problems, I'd argue most stemming from the points system that: - Made people treat it like a contest and tried to game it - Obscure, difficult questions, with obscure, difficult answers barely being valued, while 'How do I make a GET request in node' going gangbusters.

as an aside, the ranking/rating systems are largely why I quit using social media a long time ago and stick to a small chatroom of people I know. it's relatively tolerable here where scores aren't next to posts (and the user base generally tolerant, lets whoever say their piece and move on), but I use following ublock filter to hide the score stuff: news.ycombinator.com###karma news.ycombinator.com##.score news.ycomb…

I’m addicted to Reddit but confess it’s mostly about saying something clever or funny to get high scores, not necessarily insightful or informative.

Still better than X though.

Post reply on HN