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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?

#191

Post by jplusequalt »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #177
ramraj07 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the laugh.

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

#192

Post by block_dagger »

lazystar wrote: post #3

my team is anti-AI. my code review requests are ignored, or are treated more strictly than others. it feels coordinated - i will have to push back the launch date of my project as a result. another teammate added a length check to an input field, and his request was merged near instantly, even though it had zero unit testing. this team is incredibly cooked in the long term, i just need to ensure that i survive the sh…

I would start looking for a job at an AI-leaning firm.

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

#193

Post by jebarker »

I work in an R&D team as research scientist/engineer.

Cursor and Claude Code have undoubtedly accelerated certain aspects of my technical execution. In particular, root causing difficult bugs in a complicated codebase has been accelerated through the ability to generate throwaway targeted logging code and just generally having an assistant that can help me navigate and understand complex code.

However, overall I would say that AI coding tools have made my job harder in two other ways:

1. There’s an increased volume of code that requires more thorough review and/or testing or is just generally not in keeping with the overall repo design.

2. The cost is lowered for prototyping ideas so the competitive aspect of deciding what to build or which experiment to run has ramped up. I basically need to think faster and with more clarity to perform the same as I did before because the friction of implementation time has been drastically reduced.

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

#194

Post by bgdkbtv »

For professional work, I like to offload some annoying bug fixes to Claude and let it figure it out. Then, perusing the changes to make sure nothing silly is being added to the codebase. Sometimes it works pretty well. Other times, for complicated things I need to step in and manually patch. Overall, I'm a lot less stressed about meeting deadlines and being productive at work. On the other hand, I'm more stressed about losing my employment due to AI hype and its effectiveness.

For my side projects, I do like to offload the tedious steps like setup, scaffolding or updating tasks to Claude. Things like weird build or compile errors that I usually would have to spend hours Googling to figure out I can get sorted in a matter of minutes. Other than that, I still like to write my own code as I enjoy doing it.

Overall, I like it as a tool to assist in my work. What I dislike is how much peddling is being done to shove AI into everything.

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

#195

Post by jplusequalt »

NinjaTrance wrote: post #183
csto12 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you getting paid 2x more?

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

#196

Post by rsoto2 »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #140
fastasucan wrote: post #117

It makes my work suck, sadly. Team dynamics also contributes to that, admittedly. Last year I was working on implementing a pretty big feature in our codebase, it required a lot of focus to get the business logic right and at the same time you had be very creative to make this feasible to run without hogging to much resources. When I was nearly done and worked on catching bugs, team members grew tired of waiting and…

There’s a lot more going on there than AI …

Not really, this is exactly what I expect due to baseless lies from the AI companies and a disdain for employee payroll by the C-suite.

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

#197

Post by tim-tday »

fastasucan wrote: post #117

It makes my work suck, sadly. Team dynamics also contributes to that, admittedly. Last year I was working on implementing a pretty big feature in our codebase, it required a lot of focus to get the business logic right and at the same time you had be very creative to make this feasible to run without hogging to much resources. When I was nearly done and worked on catching bugs, team members grew tired of waiting and…

If someone does that simply say “no. use the latest code”

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

#198

Post by jplusequalt »

rckclmbr wrote: post #139
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #132

Earlier 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

When you write the code yourself you are slowly building up a mental model of how said thing should work. If you end up introducing a subtle bug during that process, at least you already have a good understanding of the code, so it shouldn't be much of an issue to work backwards to find out what assumptions turned out to be incorrect.

But now with Claude, the mental model of how your code works is not in your head, but resides behind a chain of reasoning from Claude Code that you are not privy too. When something breaks, you either have to spend much longer trying to piece together what your agent has made, or to continue throwing Claude at and hope it doesn't spiral into more subtle bugs.

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

#199

Post by tim-tday »

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’m the same way. But I took a bite and now I’m hooked.

I started using it for things I hate, ended up using it everywhere. I move 5x faster. I follow along most of the time. Twice a week I realize I’ve lost the thread. Once a month it sets me back a week or more.

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

#200

Post by parasti »

We're using Augment Code heavily on a "full rewrite of legacy CRM with 30 years of business rules/data" Laravel project with a team size of 4. Augment kind of became impossible to avoid once we realized the new guy is outpacing the rest of us while posessing almost no knowledge of code and working fully in the business requirements domain, extracting requirements from the customer and passing them to AI, which was encoding them in tests and implementing them in code.

I'm using `auggie` which is their CLI-based agentic tool. (They also have a VS Code integration - that became too slow and hung often the more I used it.) I don't use any prompting tricks, I just kind of steer the agent to the desired outcome by chatting to it, and switch models as needed (Sonnet 4.6 for speed and execution, GPT 5.1 for comprehension and planning).

My favorite recent interaction with Augment was to have one session write a small API and its specification within the old codebase, then have another session implement the API client entirely from the specification. As I discovered edge cases I had the first agent document them in the spec and the second agent read the updated spec and adjust the implementation. That worked much, much better than the usual ad hoc back and forth directly between me and one agent and also created a concise specification that can be tracked in the repo as documentation for humans and context for future agentic work.

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