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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?

#261

Post by robbbbbbbbbbbb »

Context: micro (5 person) software company with a mature SaaS product codebase.

We use a mix of agentic and conversational tools, just pick your own and go with it.

For Unity development (our main codebase and source of value) I give current gen tools a C- for effectiveness. For solving confined, well modularisable problems (eg refactor this texture loader; implement support for this material extension) it’s good. For most real day to day problems it’s hopelessly confused by the large codebase full of state, external dependency on chunks of Unity, implicit hardware-dependent behaviours, etc. It has no idea how to work meaningfully with Unity’s scene graph or component model. I tried using MCP to empower it here: on a trivial test project it was fine. In a real project it got completely lost and broke everything after eating 30k tokens and 40 minutes of my time, mostly because it couldn’t understand the various (documented) patterns that straddled code files and scene structure.

For web and API development I give it an A, with just a little room for improvement. In this domain it’s really effective all the way down the logical stack from architectural and deployment decisions all the way down to implementation details and debugging including digging really deep in to package version incompatibilities and figuring out problems in seconds that would take me hours. My one criticism would be the - now familiar - “junior developer” effect where it’ll often run ahead with an over engineered lump of machinery without spotting a simpler more coherent pattern. As long as you keep an eye on it it’s fine.

So in summary: if what you’re doing is all in text, nothing in binary, doesn’t involve geometric or numerical reasoning, and has billions of lines of stack overflow solutions: you’ll be golden. Otherwise it’s still very hit and miss.

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

#262

Post by dude250711 »

wg0 wrote: post #146
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 agree. The code despite detailed spec reveals bugs and edge cases upon inspection. I'm talking Claude Opus 4.6 here.

For all we know, some important clients might just be getting better service out of Anthropic's/OpenAI's "black boxes".

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

#263

Post by nsxwolf »

peab wrote: post #227
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…

This seems to be a team problem more than anything? Why are your coworkers taking on your responsibilities? Where's your manager on this?

Could be an emergent team problem that wouldn’t have had cause to exist before AI.

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

#264

Post by queenkjuul »

ramraj07 wrote: post #180
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"aren't you part of the problem?" Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?

Employees, especially ones as well leveraged and overpaid as software engineers, are not victims. They can leave. They _should_ leave. Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time.

You obviously haven't gone job hunting in 2026

I hope you get the privilege soon

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

#265

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Models aren’t reliable, and it’s a bottleneck.

My solution was to write code to force the model down a deterministic path.

It’s open source here: https://codeleash.dev

It’s working! ~200k LOC python/typescript codebase built from scratch as I’ve grown out the framework. I probably wrote 500-1000 lines of that, so ~99.5% written by Claude Code. I commit 10k-30k loc per week, code-reviewed and industrial strength quality (mainly thanks to rigid TDD)

I review every line of code but the TDD enforcement and self-reflection have now put both the process and continual improvement to said process more or less on autopilot.

It’s a software factory - I don’t build software any more, I walk around the machine with a clipboard optimizing and fixing constraints. My job is to input the specs and prompts and give the factory its best chance of producing a high quality result, then QA that for release.

I keep my operational burden minimal by using managed platforms - more info in the framework.

One caveat; I am a solo dev; my cofounder isn’t writing code. So I can’t speak to how it is to be in a team of engineers with this stuff.

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

#266

Post by yaxfaxyax »

It's useful. At my company we have an internal LLM that tends to be used in lieu of searching the web, to avoid unintentionally leaking information about what we are working on to third parties. This includes questions about software development, including generating of code. For various reasons we are not permitted to copy this verbatim, but can use it for guidance - much like, say, inspiration from Stack Overflow answers.

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

#267

Post by arwhatever »

Aurornis wrote: post #247
ramraj07 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you dont take a stand and refuse to clean their mess, aren't you part of the problem? No self respecting proponent of AI enabled development should suggest that the engineers generating the code are still not personally responsible for its quality.

> and refuse to clean their mess You can should speak up when tasks are poorly defined, underestimated, or miscommunicated. Try to flat out “refuse” assigned work and you’ll be swept away in the next round of layoffs, replaced by someone who knows how to communicate and behave diplomatically.

ramraj07 went on to clarify that they were advocating for putting the onus for cleanup back on mess generators.

They clearly were not advocating for flat out refusing.

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

#268

Post by viccis »

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but the worst part for me is that a lot of management LOVES to use Claude to generate 50 page design documents, PRDs, etc., and send them to us to "please review as soon as you can". Nobody reads it, not even the people making it. I'm watching some employees just generate endless slide decks of nonsense and then waffle when asked any specific questions. If any of that is read, it is by other peoples' Claude.

It has also enabled a few people to write code or plan out implementation details who haven't done so in a long (sometimes decade or more) time, and so I'm getting some bizarre suggestions.

Otherwise, it really does depend on what kind of code. I hand write prod code, and the only thing that AI can do is review it and point out bugs to me. But for other things, like a throwaway script to generate a bunch of data for load testing? Sure, why not.

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

#269

Post by dude250711 »

fandango1 wrote: post #228

So I am a software engineer at Microsoft, so we have been using the Github Copilot very regularly. It gives us unlimited Opus credits. The good thing is that the work gets much quicker than before, and it's actually a boon for that The issue is inflated expectations For example: If a work item ideally would take two weeks before AI, it is expected now to be done in like 2 days. So we still need to find a sweet spot s…

> If a work item ideally would take two weeks before AI, it is expected now to be done in like 2 days.

> MS is a mature place so they're still working on it and take our feedback seriously. at least that's what I have seen

Suggested feedback then, for them to take seriously: "your expectations are inflated".

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

#270

Post by cyanydeez »

ramraj07 wrote: post #79
eranation wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's such a drastic different experience than mine. May I ask what toolset are you using? Are you limited to using your home grown "AcmeCode" or have full access to Claude Code / Cursor with the latest and greatest models, 1M context size, full repo access? I see it generating between 50% to 90% accuracy in both small and large tasks, as in the PRs it generates range between being 50% usable code that a human…

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…

It's probably more to do with the intelligence required to know when a specific type of code will yield poor future coding integrations and large scale implementation.

It's pretty clear that people think greenfield projects can constantly be slopified and that AI will always be able to dig them another logical connection, so it doesn't matter which abstraction the AI chose this time; it can always be better.

This is akin to people who think we can just keep using oil to fuel technological growth because it'll some how improve the ability of technology to solve climate problems.

It's akin to the techno capitalist cult of "effective altruism" that assumes there's no way you could f'up the world that you can't fix with "good deeds"

There's a lot of hidden context in evaluating the output of LLMs, and if you're just looking at todays success, you'll come away with a much different view that if you're looking at next year's.

Optimism is only then, in this case, that you believe the AI will keep getting more powerful that it'll always clean up todays mess.

I call this techno magic, indistinguishable from religious 'optimism'

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