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Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#22By the time things are useful, you start noticing a proportion of colleagues using them (or the tools are imposed on you by your company). If it's not the case, the tools are probably not mature enough or just passing fads.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#23By and large, just ignore them? Life's a lot easier when you don't fancy yourself a 10x programmer, accept mediocrity, and just absorb best practices by osmosis a few years after they're developed by the bigshots. This reminds me a lot of early Javascript: a thousand small companies each promising a 10% improvement to your workflow. Wait a couple years and it'll be three companies each offering 150% boosts instead, w…
I don't get that take, wouldn't most people use a tool if it made you even 5% or 10% more efficient at your job after a little bit of research? Sure digging for the tool and task use case takes time but it'll more than pay back itself
5/10% efficiency gains may not translate into 5/10% compensation gains.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#24By and large, just ignore them? Life's a lot easier when you don't fancy yourself a 10x programmer, accept mediocrity, and just absorb best practices by osmosis a few years after they're developed by the bigshots. This reminds me a lot of early Javascript: a thousand small companies each promising a 10% improvement to your workflow. Wait a couple years and it'll be three companies each offering 150% boosts instead, w…
I don't consider myself a 10x programmer, but I do consider writing unit tests and mapping values to properties to be tedious. AI (copilot) makes those less tedious. I love it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#25By and large, just ignore them? Life's a lot easier when you don't fancy yourself a 10x programmer, accept mediocrity, and just absorb best practices by osmosis a few years after they're developed by the bigshots. This reminds me a lot of early Javascript: a thousand small companies each promising a 10% improvement to your workflow. Wait a couple years and it'll be three companies each offering 150% boosts instead, w…
I don't get that take, wouldn't most people use a tool if it made you even 5% or 10% more efficient at your job after a little bit of research? Sure digging for the tool and task use case takes time but it'll more than pay back itself
Deskwork efficiency has never been a challenge in my work or in my career. My productivity is usually paced to some client or collaborator already, so getting a little bit mode done in my time doesn't win me much but a longer wait at that gate. That's been consistently the case for nearly 25+ years.
So no, I don't invest a lot of attention in further optimizing how quickly I get my work done. If anything, I'd rather invest that attention in strengthening the routines and practices of my work so that it demands less conscious attention as I do it, at no loss of quality. Write a module 5% faster? Doesn't matter to anyone. Leave a workday refreshed and ripe because I've mastered my tools and workflows? Huge win for me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#26Twitter. AI news/info on Twitter is ridiculously better than anything found on HN.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#27By and large, just ignore them? Life's a lot easier when you don't fancy yourself a 10x programmer, accept mediocrity, and just absorb best practices by osmosis a few years after they're developed by the bigshots. This reminds me a lot of early Javascript: a thousand small companies each promising a 10% improvement to your workflow. Wait a couple years and it'll be three companies each offering 150% boosts instead, w…
> absorb best practices by osmosis a few years after they're developed by the bigshots
Better yet, ignore the concept of "best practices" and learn what different software development practices have to offer in different contexts, from your personal experience and from nuanced reports from people you (at least somewhat) trust.
There are a lot of ideas flying around about how to do software development better, in my experience, someone describing an idea as a "best practice" is more likely to be a red flag than a sign you should pay attention.
That said, try Copilot. It's surprisingly helpful.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#28LlamaIndex, HuggingFace, LangChain, and Ludwig are functioning as partial proxy aggregators of what is working and working better than alternatives. Most people in this space have multiple models for virtually every step in their heads. You cannot and should not process them. Thus you need aggregation and filtration on some objective(s) and presumptions with a purpose or you're a boat on a turbulent sea.
One simple tool I use to evaluate is how easy is it to spin up a working demo, in isolation or context of other tools, to show the maturity of thought on the idea moving to application. If there is no benchmark on output(s) before you start that is more science/fantasizing than business. but maybe that's your goal, just don't delude yourself in what you're doing. I also look up project leads on Linkedin and such since these things require push and without a good promoter, usually don't pan out(see crypto for example).
Buried lead: I've built a few tools allowing me to parse the tree and graph structures of new projects in charts/schemas to get quick visuals for myself and the LLMs I use to code. Additionally, I have built tooling to test rapidly. For if everything is dynamic, optimizing measurement is quite valuable in and of itself.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#29I ignore them. If a technique is useful enough, it will become mainstream and won't need to be advertised by a small community of apostles on X or Mastodon.
I work as a junior programmer/sysadmin. Most of the work I do has centered around being aware of the abstract logical nature of the problems I solve. Thus, I have had little issues solving a routing policy in IOS, JunOS, OpenBSD or plain old Linux, for example. Or writing some WSGI application to interface with an old water meter. Or fixing a broken Ubuntu 12 webserver that no-one has accessed in years.
Considering the comments on another topic on HN today, It still looks like GPTs have great issues with abstraction, which I personally experienced when I asked it to fix some issue I've been having regarding data structures I've been using in a project. So I don't think I'll be running out of things to do so soon.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
#30Twitter. AI news/info on Twitter is ridiculously better than anything found on HN.
I find the garbage vs interesting content to be not great on Twitter, especially lately with the lack of moderation. The important tweets will make it to HN or some sun reddits after a few hours.