Measured 12x increase in issues fixed/implemented. Solo founder business, so these are real numbers (over 2 months), not corporate fakery. And no, I am not interested in convincing you, I hope all my competitors believe that AI is junk :-)
Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
171–180 of 657 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#172AI is great for getting stuff to work on technologies you're not familiar with. E.g. to write an Android or iOS app or an OpenGL shader, or even a Linux driver. It's also great for sysadmin work such as getting an ethernet connection up, or installing a docker container.
For main coding tasks, it is imho not suitable because you still have to read the code and I hate reading other people's code.
And also, the AI is still slow, so it is hard to stay focused on a task.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#173For my job which is mostly YAML engineering with some light Go coding (Platform) I'm finding it useful. We're DRY-ing out a bunch of YAML with CUE at the moment and it's sped up that work up tremendously. When it comes to personal projects I'm feeling extremely unmotivated. Things feel more in reach and I've probably built ten times the number of throwaway projects in the past year than I have in previous years. Yet…
What in the world is YAML engineering?
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#174I am having a blast at work. I've been leaning hard into AI (as directed by leadership) while others are falling far far behind. I am building new production features, often solo or with one or two other engineers, at lightning speed, and being recognized across the org for it. This is an incredible opportunity for many engineers that won't last. I'm trying to make the most of it. It will be sad when software is no longer a useful pastimes for humans. I'm thinking another three years and most of us will be unemployed or our jobs will have been completely transformed into something unrecognizable a few short years ago.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you aren't doing this level of work by now, you will be automated soon. It's harder and harder to detect sarcasm these days but in case you're being serious, I've tested a similar setup and I noticed Claude produces perfectly plausible code that has very subtle bugs that get harder and harder to notice. In the end, the initial speedup was gone and I decided to rewrite everything by hand. I'm working on a product…
I keep hearing “Claude creates subtle bugs”, but how is that different than people engineers? I’ve never worked in a bug free codebase
Everybody produces bugs, but Claude is good a producing code that looks like it solves the problem but doesn't. Developers worth working with, grow out of this in a new project. Claude doesn't.
An example I have of this is when I asked Claude to copy a some functionality from a front-end application to a back-end application. It got all of the function signatures right but then hallucinated the contents of the functions. Part of this functionality included a look up map for some values. The new version had entirely hallucinated keys and values, but the values sounded correct if you didn't compare with the original. A human would have literally copied the original lookup map.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#176[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that's such a drastic different experience than mine. May I ask what toolset are you using? Are you limited to using your home grown "AcmeCode" or have full access to Claude Code / Cursor with the latest and greatest models, 1M context size, full repo access? I see it generating between 50% to 90% accuracy in both small and large tasks, as in the PRs it generates range between being 50% usable code that a human…
I used to think that the people who keep saying (in March 2026) that AI does not generate good code are just not smart and ask stupid prompts. I think I've amended that thought. They are not necessarily lacking in intelligence. I hypothesize that LLMs pick up on optimism and pessimism among other sentiments in the incoming prompt: someone prompting with no hope that the result will be useful end up with useless garba…
Exactly. You have to manifest at a high vibrational frequency.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#178[flagged]
> Software engineering is a mostly solved problem at this point I guess that's why Claude Code has 0 open issues on Github. Since software engineering is solved, their autonomous agents can easily fix their own software much better and faster than human devs. They can just add "make no mistakes" to their prompt and the model can solve any problem! Oh wait, they have 5,000+ open issues on Github[1]. I'm yet to be conv…
[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#179I haven't actively looked into it, but on a couple of occasions after google began inserting gemini results at the top of the list, I decided to try using some of the generated code samples when then search didn't turn up anything useful. The results were a mixed bag- the libraries that I'd been searching for examples from were not very broadly used and their interfaces volatile enough that in some cases the model was returning results for obsolete versions. Not a huge deal since the canonical docs had some recommendations. In at least a couple of cases though, the results included references to functions that had never been in the library at all, even though they sounded not only plausible but would have been useful if they did in fact exist.
In the end, I am generally using the search engine to find examples because I am too lazy to look at the source for the library I'm using, but if the choice is between an LLM that fabricates stuff some percentage of the time and just reading the fucking code like I've been doing for decades, I'd rather just take my chances with the search engine. If I'm unable to understand the code I'm reading enough to make it work, it's a good signal that maybe I shouldn't be using it at all since ultimately I'm going to be on the hook to straighten things out if stuff goes sideways.
Ultimately that's what this is all about- writing code is a big part of my career but the thing that has kept me employed is being able to figure out what to do when some code that I assembled (through some combination of experimentation, documentation, or duplication) is not behaving the way I had hoped. If I don't understand my own code chances are I'll have zero intuition about why it's not working correctly, and so the idea of introducing a bunch of random shit thrown together by some service which may or may not be able to explain it to me would be a disservice to my employers who trust me on the basis of my history of being careful.
I also just enjoy figuring shit out on my own.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#180Earlier 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.
"aren't you part of the problem?" Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?
Employees, especially ones as well leveraged and overpaid as software engineers, are not victims. They can leave. They _should_ leave. Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time.