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Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#231

Post by jerf »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #169
matt3210 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve yet to see any real work get done with agents. Can you share examples or videos of real production level work getting done? Maybe in a tutorial format? My current understanding is that it’s for demos and toy projects

Good question. Why hasn't there been a profusion of new game-changing software, fixes to long-standing issues in open-source software, any nontrivial shipped product at all? Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones? Where is all the shovelware [0]? Previous HN discussion here [1]. Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the…

"Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones?"

There is. We had to basically create a new category for them on /r/golang because there was a quite distinct step change near the beginning of this year where suddenly over half the posts to the subreddit were "I asked my AI to put something together, here's a repo with 4 commits, 3000 lines of code, and an AI-generated README.md. It compiles and I may have even used it once or twice." It toned down a bit but it's still half-a-dozen posts a day like that on average.

Some of them are at least useful in principle. Some of them are the same sorts of things you'd see twice a month, only now we can see them twice a week if not twice a day. The problem wasn't necessarily the utility or the lack thereof, it was simply the flood of them. It completely disturbed the balance of the subreddit.

To the extent that you haven't heard about these, I'd observe that the world already had more apps than you could possibly have ever heard about and the bottleneck was already marketing rather than production. AIs have presumably not successfully done much about helping people market their creations.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#232

Post by malloc2048 »

bcherny wrote: post #37

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. A few tips: 1. If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. I add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. 2. Use Plan mode (press shift-tab 2x). Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan b…

Thank you for Claude Code (Web). Google has a similar offering with Google Jules. I got really, really bad results from Jules and was amazed by Claude Code when I finally discovered it.

I compared both with the same set of prompts and Claude Code seemed to be a senior expert developer and Jules, well don't know who be that bad ;-)

Anyway, I also wanted to have persistent information, so I don't have to feed Claude Code the same stuff over and over again. I was looking for similar functionality as Claude projects. But that's not available for Claude Code Web.

So, I asked Claude what would be a way of achieving pretty the same as projects, and it told me to put all information I wanted to share in a file with the filename:.clinerules. Claude told me I should put that file in the root of my repository.

So please help me, is your recommendation the correct way of doing this, or did Claude give the correct answer?

Maybe you can clear that up by explaining the difference between the two files?

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#233

Post by toxic72 »

girvo wrote: post #140
Fargren wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explains why it happens, but doesn't really help with the problem. The expectation I have as a pretty naive user, is that what is in the .md file should be permanently in the context. It's good to understand why this is not the case, but it's unintuitive and can lead to frustration. It's bad UX, if you ask me. I'm sure there are workarounds such as resetting the context, but the point is that god UX would mean s…

Yeah the current best approach to aggressively compact and recreate context by starting fresh. It’s awkward and I wish I didn’t have to.

I'm surprised this hasn't been been automated yet but I'm pretty naive to the space - the problem of "when?"/"how often?" seems like a fun one to chew on

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#234

Post by 3vidence »

This isn't exactly an answer to your question but I've experienced some efficiency gains in using AI agents for pre-reviewing my PRs and getting it to create tests.

You still get to maintain the core code and maintain understandability but it helps with the tasks the take time that aren't super interesting.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#235

Post by theahura »

docheinestages wrote: post #214
theahura wrote: post #200

Soft plug: take a look at https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-profiles I've spent the last ~4 months figuring out how to make coding agents better, and it's really paid off. The configs at the link above make claude code significantly better, passively. It's a one-shot install, and it may just be able to one-shot your problem, because it does the hard work of 'knowing how to use the agents' for you. Would love to k…

How does it compare to Claude Code's skills [1] ? [1] https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/skills

Nori uses Claude Code's skills extensively, which you can see here: https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-profiles/tree/main/src...

We use Claude Code's ability to use skills by defining a bunch of really useful and common skills that are necessary for writing software. For e.g. brainstorming, doing test driven development, or submitting a git commit.

The specific skills you linked are interesting demos of what you can do with skills! But most of them are not useful for the day to day of building software

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#236

Post by KetoManx64 »

amirhirsch wrote: post #221
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Why hasn't there been a profusion of new game-changing software, fixes to long-standing issues in open-source software, any nontrivial shipped product at all? Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones? Where is all the shovelware [0]? Previous HN discussion here [1]. Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the…

The effect of these tools is people losing their software jobs (down 35% since 2020). Unemployed devs aren’t clamoring to go use AI on OSS.

Same thing happened to farmers during the industrial revolution, same thing happened to horse drawn carriage drivers, same thing happened to accountants when Excel came along, mathmaticins, and on and on the list goes. Just part of human peogress.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#237

Post by udfalkso »

thfuran wrote: post #61
jedberg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Claude MD is like the documentation you hand to a new engineer on your team that explains details about your code that they wouldn't otherwise know. It's not bad to need one.

But that documentation shouldn’t need to be updated nearly every other day.

Same thing happens every time a new hire joins the team. Lots of documentation is stale and needs updating as they onboard.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#238

Post by nl »

malloc2048 wrote: post #232
bcherny wrote: post #37

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. A few tips: 1. If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. I add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. 2. Use Plan mode (press shift-tab 2x). Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan b…

Thank you for Claude Code (Web). Google has a similar offering with Google Jules. I got really, really bad results from Jules and was amazed by Claude Code when I finally discovered it. I compared both with the same set of prompts and Claude Code seemed to be a senior expert developer and Jules, well don't know who be that bad ;-) Anyway, I also wanted to have persistent information, so I don't have to feed Claude Co…

CLAUDE.md is the correct file for Claude.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#239

Post by cageface »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #169
matt3210 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve yet to see any real work get done with agents. Can you share examples or videos of real production level work getting done? Maybe in a tutorial format? My current understanding is that it’s for demos and toy projects

Good question. Why hasn't there been a profusion of new game-changing software, fixes to long-standing issues in open-source software, any nontrivial shipped product at all? Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones? Where is all the shovelware [0]? Previous HN discussion here [1]. Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the…

As another example, the MacApps Reddit has been flooded with new apps recently.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#240

Post by cebert »

jMyles wrote: post #174
bcherny wrote: post #37

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. A few tips: 1. If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. I add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. 2. Use Plan mode (press shift-tab 2x). Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan b…

3. Puppeteer? Or Playwright? I haven't been able to make Puppeteer work for the past 8 weeks or so ("failed to reconnect"). Do you have a doc on this?

I know the Playwright MCP server works great. I use it daily.
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