Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 657 posts

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

#271

Post by abcde666777 »

greenpizza13 wrote: post #211

I work at a very prominent AI company. We have access to every tool under the sun. There are various levels of success for all levels — managers, PMs, engineers. We have cursor with essentially unlimited Opus 4.6 and it’s fundamentally changed my workflow as a senior engineer. I find I spend much more time designing and testing my software and development time is almost entirely prompting and reviewing AI changes. I’…

I think people get a bit paranoid about coding skills atrophying. I had a period where I stopped programming for multiple years and it really only took a month to get back into the swing of things when I returned, and most of that was just re-jogging my memory on the syntax and standard library classes (C++ at the time).

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

#272

Post by GeoSys »

humbleharbinger wrote: post #213

I'm an engineer at Amazon - we use Kiro (our own harness) with Opus 4.6 underneath. Most of my gripes are with the harness, CC is way better. In terms of productivity I'm def 2-4X more productive at work, >10x more productive on my side business. I used to work overtime to deliver my features. Now I work 9-5 and am job hunting on the side while delivering relatively more features. I think a lot of people are missing…

[dead]

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

#273

Post by queenkjuul »

ramoz wrote: post #256

Right now I enjoy the labs' cli harnesses, Claude Code, and Codex (especially for review). I do a bunch of niche stuff with Pi and OpenCode. My productivity is up. Some nuances with working with others using the same AI tools- we all end up trying to boil the ocean at first- creating a ton of verbose docs and massive PRs, but I/they end up regressing on throwing up every sort of LLM output we get. Instead, we contino…

Worktrees slap.

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by robbbbbbbbbbbb »

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…

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, this is a fascinating hypothesis and honestly super believable. It makes way more sense than the intuitive belief that there’s actually something under the human skin suit understanding any of this code.

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

#276

Post by avadodin »

spicyusername wrote: post #107

Originally my workflow was: - Think about requirement - Spend 0-360 minutes looking through the code - Start writing code - Realize I didn't think about it quite enough and fix the design - Finish writing code - Write unit tests - Submit MR - Fix MR feedback Until recently no LLM was able to properly disrupt that, however the release of Opus 4.5 changed that. Now my workflow is: - Throw as much context into Opus as p…

Odd how you add the time for the requirement analysis but none for the coding.

Then you tell us you leave 83% of the analysis —and the coding— to a code chatbot.

Are you actually more productive or are you going to find out down the line the chatbot missed some requirements and made APIs up to fill up a downstream document and now you better support them by yesterday?

In ye olden days, people doing this would scream at the junior developers. Are you going to scream at your screen?

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

#277

Post by abcde666777 »

wk_end wrote: post #124

Around a year ago I started a new position at a very large tech company that I won't name, working on a pre-existing web project there. The code base isn't terrible - though not very good either, by-and-large - but it's absolutely massive, often over-engineered, pretty unorthodox, and definitely has some questionable design decisions; even after more than a year of working with it I still feel like a beginner much of…

Using these tools for understanding seems to be one of the best use cases - lots of pros, less dangerous cons (worst case scenario is a misleading understanding, but that can be minimized by directly double checking the claims being made).

In fact it looks like an arising theme is that whenever we use these tools it's valuable to maintain a human understanding of what's actually going on.

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

#278

Post by mindwok »

I quit my job and went out on my own freelancing.

So far, it's been fantastic. I can do more things for clients, much faster, than I ever dreamed would be possible when I've attempted work like this before.

I think the biggest problem with AI coding is that it simply doesn't fit well into existing enterprise structures. I couldn't imagine being able to do anything productive when I'm stuck having to rely on other teams or request access to stuff from the internet like I did in previous jobs.

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

#280

Post by cyanydeez »

devmor wrote: post #135
turlockmike wrote: post #96

[flagged]

Do you have any kind of proof you can show us? This reads like every other AI hype post but I have still never seen anyone demonstrate anything but proof of concept apps and imaginary workloads.

yeah, you'd think these commercial organizations would sit down with like, one marketer, and just put a non-trivial app together in real time and screen cap it all...

like, we've had this technology for several decades now, and none of these AI tools are like: "This is so great, let me show everyone how to write a CRUD database with a notepad and calendar app" or whatever.

Post reply on HN