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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?

#181

Post by tehjoker »

Izkata wrote: post #149

I don't use it. I know my mind fairly well, and I know my style of laziness will result in atrophying skills. Better not to risk it. One of my co-workers already admitted as much to me around six months ago, and that he was trying not to use AI for any code generation anymore, but it was really difficult to stop because it was so easy to reach for. Sounded kind of like a drug addiction to me. And I had the impression…

I use AI to discuss and possibly generate ideas and tests, but I make sure I understand everything and type it in except for trivial stuff. The main value of an engineer is understanding things. AI can help me understand things better and faster. If I just setup plans for AI and vibe, human capital is neglected and declines. I don't think there's much of a future if you don't know what you're doing, but there is always a future for people with deep understanding of problems and systems.

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

#182

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Define "professional."

I write stuff for free. It's definitely "professional grade," and lots of people use the stuff I ship, but I don't earn anything for it.

I use AI every day, but I don't think that it is in the way that people here use it.

I use it as a "coding partner" (chat interface).

It has accelerated my work 100X. The quality seems OK. I have had to learn to step back, and let the LLM write stuff the way that it wants, but if I do that, and perform minimal changes to what it gives me, the results are great.

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

#183

Post by NinjaTrance »

csto12 wrote: post #105
turlockmike wrote: post #96

[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.

> I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it making making subtle mistakes, all the time.

Didn't we make subtle mistakes without AI?

Why did we spend so much time debugging and doing code reviews?

> Are you really being more productive (let’s say 3x times more)

At least 2x more productive, and that's huge.

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

#185

Post by max_ »

I use it as a research tool.

What it has done is replace my Googling and asking people looking up stuff on stack over flow.

Its also good for generating small boiler plate code.

I don't use the whole agents thing and there are so many edge cases that I always need to understand & be aware of that the AI honestly think cannot capture

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

#186

Post by owenpalmer »

It's a game changer for reading large codebases and debugging.

Error messages were the "slop" of the pre-LLM era. This is where an LLM shines, filling in the gaps where software engineering was neglected.

As for writing code, I don't let it generate anything that I couldn't have written myself, or anything that I can't keep in my brain at once. Otherwise I get really nervous about committing.

The job of a software engineer does and always has relied upon taking responsibility for the quality of one's work. Whether it's auto-complete or a fancier auto-complete, the responsibility should rest on your shoulders.

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

#187

Post by tehjoker »

turlockmike wrote: post #118
IncreasePosts wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

Another way of saying this is most line engineers will be moving into management, but managing AIs instead of people.

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

#188

Post by Kon5ole »

Like many others I started feeling it had legs during the past few months. Tools and models reached some level where it suddenly started living up to some of the hype.

I'm still learning how to make the most of it but my current state is one of total amazement. I can't believe how well this works now.

One game-changer has been custom agents and agent orchestration, where you let agents kick off other agents and each one is customized and keeps a memory log. This lets me make several 1000 loc features in large existing codebases without reaching context limits, and with documentation that lets me review the work with some confidence.

I have delivered several features in large legacy codebases that were implemented while I attended meetings. Agents have created greenfield dashboards, admin consoles and such from scratch that would have taken me days to do myself, during daily standups. If it turned out bad, I tweaked the request and made another attempt over lunch. Several useful tools have been made that save me hours per week but I never took the time to make myself.

For now, I love it. I do feel a bit of "mourning the craft" but love seeing things be realized in hours instead of days or weeks.

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

#189

Post by block_dagger »

makerofthings wrote: post #163

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 reall…

I work at a company that maintains one of the largest Rails codebases in the world (their claim, but believable). My experience has been the opposite - Claude and Cursor have done a wonderful job of helping me understand the implement new features in this gigantic codebase. I actually found out through AI that while I enjoy writing code, I enjoy building great software better, the coding was just a means to the end.

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

#190

Post by tehjoker »

eeperson wrote: post #175
rckclmbr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 functi…

I asked claude to help me figure out some statistical calculation in Apple Numbers. It helpfully provided the results of the calculation. I ignored it and implemented it in the spreadsheet and got completely different (correct) results. Claude did help me figure out how to do it correctly though!
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