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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?

#21

Post by eranation »

What you said about "we're all cooked" and "AI is useless" is literally me and everyone I know switching between the two on an hourly basis...

I find it the most exciting time for me as a builder, I can just get more things done.

Professionally, I'm dreading for our future, but I'm sure it will be better than I fear, worse than I hope.

From a toolset, I use the usual, Cursor (Super expensive if you go with Opus 4.6 max, but their computer use is game changing, although soon will become a commodity), Claude code (pro max plan) - is my new favorite. Trying out codex, and even copilot as it's practically free if you have enterprise GitHub. I'm going to probably move to Claude Code, I'm paying way too much for Cursor, and I don't really need tab completion anymore... once Claude Code will have a decent computer use environment, I'll probably cancel my Cursor account. Or... I'll just use my own with OpenClaw, but I'm not going to give it any work / personal access, only access to stuff that is publicly available (e.g. run sanity as a regular user). Playing with skills, subagents, agent teams, etc... it's all just markdowns and json files all the way down...

About our professional future:

I'm not going to start learning to be a plumber / electrician / A/C repair etc, and I am not going to recommend my children to do so either, but I am not sure I will push them to learn Computer Science, unless they really want to do Computer Science.

What excites me the most right now is my experiments with OpenClaw / NanoClaw, I'm just having a blast.

tl;dr most exciting yet terrifying times of my life.

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

#22

Post by asdff »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #10

I work at a FAANG. Professionally, I have had almost no luck with it, outside of summarizing design docs or literally just finding something in the code that a simple search might not find: such is this team's code that does X? I am yet to successfully prompt it and get a working commit. Further, I will add that I also don't know any ICs personally who have successfully used it. Though, there's endless posts of peopl…

Can you elaborate on the shortcomings you find in professional setting that aren't coming up on personal projects? With it handling greenfield tasks are you perhaps referring to the usual sort of boilerplate code/file structure setup that is step 0 with using a lot of libraries?

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

#23

Post by saadn92 »

Exceptionally well. I’ve been using it for my side project for the last 7 months and have learned how to use it really well on a rather large codebase now. My side project has about 100k LOC and most of it is AI generated, though I do heavily review and edit.

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

#24

Post by scuff3d »

drrob wrote: post #5

I've only recently begun using copilot auto-complete in Visual Studio using Claude (doing C# development/maintenance of three SaaS products). I've been a coder since 1999. The suggestions are correct about 40% of the time, so I'm actually surprised when they're right, rather than becoming reliant on them. It saves me maybe 10 minutes a day.

The only part AI auto complete I found I really like is when I have a function call that takes like a dozen arguments, and the auto complete can just shove it all together for me. Such a nice little improvement.

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

#25

Post by suzzer99 »

mc-0 wrote: post #2

I just moved to a new team in my company that prides itself on being "AI-First". The work is a relatively new project that was stood up by a small team of two developers (both of whom seem pretty smart) in the last 4 months. Both acknowledged that some parts of their tech stack, they just don't at all understand (next.js frontend). The backend is a gigantic monorepo of services glued together. The manager & a senior…

This app sounds destined for total disaster.

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

#27

Post by mellosouls »

It churns through boring stuff but it's like I imagine the intellectual equivalent of breaking in a wild horse at times, so capable, so fast but easy to find yourself in a pile on the floor.

I'm learning all the time and it's fun, exasperating, tremendously empowering and very definitely a new world.

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

#28

Post by hdhdhsjsbdh »

suzzer99 wrote: post #15
hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #13

It has made my job an awful slog, and my personal projects move faster. At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the main project. It also included a…

> At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. This has to be the most thankless job for the near future. It's hard and you get about as much credit as the worker who cleans up the job site after the contractors are done, even though you're actually fixing structural defects. And god forbid you introduce a regression bug cleaning up some horrible redun…

Near future being the key term here imo. The entire task I mentioned was not an engineering problem, but a communication issue. The two project owners could have just talked to each other about the design, then coded it correctly in the first pass, obviating the need for the code janitor. Once orgs adapt to this new workflow, they’ll replace the code janitors with much cheaper Claude credits.

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

#29

Post by svara »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #10

I work at a FAANG. Professionally, I have had almost no luck with it, outside of summarizing design docs or literally just finding something in the code that a simple search might not find: such is this team's code that does X? I am yet to successfully prompt it and get a working commit. Further, I will add that I also don't know any ICs personally who have successfully used it. Though, there's endless posts of peopl…

Could you say more on how the tasks where it works vs. doesn't work differ? Just the fact that it's both small and greenfield in the one case and presumably neither in the other?

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

#30

Post by CharlesW »

pgt wrote: post #17

I am getting disproportionately good results with the models by following a process: spec -> plan -> critique -> improve plan -> implement plan.

If I may "yes, and" this: spec → plan → critique → improve plan → implement plan → code review

It may sound absurd to review an implementation with the same model you used to write it, but it works extremely well. You can optionally crank the "effort" knob (if your model has one) to "max" for the code review.

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