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

Can you provide an example of how you actually prompt AI models? I get the feeling the difference among everyone's experiences has to do with prompting and expectation.

The best thing to do is to schedule meetings with those people to go over the docs with them. Now you force them to eat their own shit and waste their own time the more output they create.

Net negative. I do find it genuinely useful for code review, and "better search engine" or snippets, and sometimes for rubber ducking, but for agent mode and actual longer coding tasks I always end up rewriting the code it makes. Whatever it produces always looks like one of those students who constantly slightly misunderstands and only cares about minor test objectives, never seeing the big picture. And I waste so much time on the hope that this time it will make me more productive if only I can nudge it in the right direction, maybe I'm not holding it right, using the right tools/processes/skills etc. It feels like javascript frameworks all over again.

It is definitely making me more productive.

Tasks where, in the past, I have thought “if I had a utility to do x it would save me y time” and I’d either start and give up or spend much longer than y on it are now super easy, create a directory, claude “create an app to do x” so simple.

Two contexts:

1. Workplace, where I work on a lot of legacy code for a crusty old CRM package (Saleslogix/Infor), and a lot of SQL integration code between legacy systems (System21).

So far I've avoided using AI generated code here simply because the AI tools won't know the rules and internal functions of these sets of software, so the time wrangling them into an understanding would mitigate any benefits.

In theory where available I could probably feed a chunk of the documentation into an agent and get some kind of sensible output, but that's a lot of context to have to provide, and in some cases such documentation doesn't exist at all, so I'd have to write it all up myself - and would probably get quasi hallucinatory output as a reward for my efforts.

2. Personally where I've been working on an indie game in Unity for four years. Fairly heavy code base - uses ECS, burst, job system, etc. From what I've seen AI agents will hallucinate too much with those newer packages - they get confused about how to apply them correctly.

A lot of the code's pretty carefully tuned for performance (thousands of active NPCs in game), which is also an area I don't trust AI coding at all, given it's a conglomeration of 'average code in the wild that ended up in the training set'.

At most I sometimes use it for rubber ducking or performance. For example at one point I needed a function to calculate the point in time at which two circles would collide (for npc steering and avoidance), and it can be helpful to give you some grasp of the necessary math. But I'll generally still re-write the output by hand to tune it and make sure I fully grok it.

Also tried to use it recently to generate additional pixel art in a consistent style with the large amount of art I already have. Results fell pretty far short unfortunately - there's only a couple of pixel art based models/services out there and they're not up to snuff.