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Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#21

Post by al_borland »

It’s usually just a slightly faster web search. When I try to have it do more, I end up spinning my wheels and then doing a web search.

I’ll sometimes have it help read really long error messages as well.

I got it to help me fix a reported security vulnerability, but it was a long road and I had to constantly work to keep it from going off the rails and adding insane amounts of complexity and extra code. It likely would have been faster for me to read up on the specific vulnerability, take a walk, and come back to my desk to write something up.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#22

Post by corysama »

throwup238 wrote: post #13
simonw wrote: post #11

One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed. This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it…

> and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. MESA drivers are a godsend in Claude Code for web if working on non-web GUIs. It can take screenshots and otherwise interact with them.

What does "MESA drivers" refer to here? I'm guessing it's not GPU drivers from https://mesa3d.org/

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#23

Post by mjr00 »

If I know what I want to code and it's a purely mechanical exercise to code it, I'll just tell Claude what to do and it does it. Pretty neat.

When I don't know what I want to do, I read existing code, think about it, and figure it out. Sometimes I'll sketch out ideas by writing code, then when I have something I like I'll get Claude to take my sketch as an example and having it go forward.

The big mistake I see people make is not knowing when to quit. Even with Opus 4.5 it still does weird things, and I've seen people end up arguing with Claude or trying to prompt engineer their way out of things when it would have been maybe 30 seconds of work to fix things manually. It's like people at shopping malls who spend 15 minutes driving in the parking lot to find a spot close to the door when they could have parked in the first spot they saw and walked to the door in less than a minute.

And as always, every line of code was written by me even if it wasn't written by me. I'm responsible for it, so I review all of it. If I wouldn't have written it on my own without AI assistance I don't commit it.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#24

Post by sjm-lbm »

jackfranklyn wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Pretty similar here. Another thing I keep thinking is a phrase pilots use when flying airplanes using FMSes and autopilot: "never fly your airplane to a place you haven't already been to in your mind" - that is, don't ever just sit back and let the automation work, stay a step ahead of the automation and drop down to less automation when you aren't certain that it is doing the right thing.

When you send Claude Code something and already have an idea for what an acceptable solution looks like, you're a massive step ahead when it's time to read the diff and decide what you think of it. This does mean that every so often my productivity drops to basically zero as I try to understand what is actually happening before I just put the AI on the job, but so far it seems to be a good rule to keep in mind that allows me to use AI effectively while generating a code base that I still understand.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#25

Post by cadamsdotcom »

The biggest principle is codification. Codify everything.

For instance, this skill of web development: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vercel-labs/web-interface-...

That’s too much for a model to carry in its context while it’s trying to do actual work.

Far better is to give that skill.md to a model and have it produce several hundred lines of code with a shebang at the top. Now you haven’t got a skill, you’ve got a script. And it’s a script the model can run any time to check its work, without knowing what the script does, how, or why - it just sees the errors. Now all your principles of web dev can be checked across your codebase in a few hundred milliseconds while burning zero tokens.

TDD is codification too: codifying in executable form the precise way you want your logic to work. Enforce a 10ms timeout on every unit test and as a side effect your model won’t be able to introduce I/O or anything else that prevents parallel, randomized execution of your test suite. It’s awesome to be able to run ALL the tests hundreds of times per day.

Constantly checking your UI matches your design system? Have the model write a script that looks at your frontend codebase and refuses to let the model commit anything that doesn’t match the design system.

Codification is an insanely powerful thing to build into your mindset.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#27

Post by Yodel0914 »

bravura wrote: post #10

We use beads for everything. We label them as "human-spec" needed if they are not ready to implement. We label them as "qa-needed" if they cannot be verified through automatic tests. I wrote beads-skills for Claude that I'll release soon to enforce this process. 2026 will be the year of agent orchestration for those of us who are frustrated having 10 different agents to check on constantly. gastown is cool but too op…

Out of interest, what sort of products/systems are you building?

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#28

Post by anditherobot »

We're overlooking a critical metric in AI-assisted development: Token and Context Window to Utility Ratio.

AI coding tools are burning massive token budgets on boilerplate thousands of tokens just to render simple interfaces.

Consider the token cost of "Hello World":

- Tkinter: `import tkinter as tk; tk.Button(text="Hello").pack()`

- React: 500MB of node_modules, and dependencies

Right now context windows token limits are finite and costly. What do you think?

My prediction is that tooling that manage token and context efficiency will become essential.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#29

Post by Yodel0914 »

catigula wrote: post #7
jackfranklyn wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Having AI generate tests is technical debt unless what you're doing is extremely trivial and well-trodden in which case you can basically gen all of the code and not care at all. Tests are where the moat still exists because prior to creating tests the outcomes are unverifiable.

As somewhat of an AI-agnostic, I disagree. Writing tests is one of the things I find most useful about copilot. Of course you need to review them first correctness, but (especially for unit tests) it’s pretty good and getting it right first-time.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#30

Post by mountain_peak »

mjr00 wrote: post #23

If I know what I want to code and it's a purely mechanical exercise to code it, I'll just tell Claude what to do and it does it. Pretty neat. When I don't know what I want to do, I read existing code, think about it, and figure it out. Sometimes I'll sketch out ideas by writing code, then when I have something I like I'll get Claude to take my sketch as an example and having it go forward. The big mistake I see peopl…

> The big mistake I see people make is not knowing when to quit.

This is sage advice. I spent the better part of a day trying to steer Gemini into correcting an inconsistency when I likely could have solved it in under an hour. I think persevering with Gemini was due to a number of factors, including novelty, stubbornness, and (unfortunately) not knowing in detail what Gemini had written up to that point.

I eventually studied the resulting code, which ended up having a number of nested 'hacks' and required refactoring - more time wasted, but still much faster overall.

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