I find it most useful for getting up to speed on new libraries quickly, and for bouncing design ideas. I'll lay out what my goals are and the approaches I'm considering, and ask it to poke holes in them or to point out issues or things to keep in mind. Found it shockingly helpful in covering my blind spots
Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
31–40 of 87 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#32One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed. This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it…
Half my visits to HN are to check out a comment that explains the right uv inline dep syntax
#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
# /// script
# dependencies = [
# "requestsRe: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#33We're overlooking a critical metric in AI-assisted development: Token and Context Window to Utility Ratio . AI coding tools are burning massive token budgets on boilerplate thousands of tokens just to render simple interfaces. Consider the token cost of "Hello World": - Tkinter : `import tkinter as tk; tk.Button(text="Hello").pack()` - React : 500MB of node_modules, and dependencies Right now context windows token li…
But the model doesn't need to read the node_modules to write a React app, it just needs to write the React code (which it is heavily post-trained to be able to use). So the fair counter example is like:
function Hello() { return Hello }
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. MESA drivers are a godsend in Claude Code for web if working on non-web GUIs. It can take screenshots and otherwise interact with them.
What does "MESA drivers" refer to here? I'm guessing it's not GPU drivers from https://mesa3d.org/
No those don’t work in most cloud VMs but MESA provides llvmpipe/softpipe implementations for Vulkan, OpenGL, etc. They’re software renders so relatively slow but work in headless VMs like Claude Code for web environments.
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#35At work unfortunately (?) we don't use any AI but there is movement to introduce it in some form (it is a heavily regulated area so it won't be YOLO coding using an agent for sure).
But my side projects which I kinda abandoned a long time ago are getting a second life and it is really fun just to direct the agent instead of slowly re-aquire all of the knowledge and waste time typing in all the stuff into the computer.
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#36One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed. This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it…
I've been trying to use workflows like this, but I quickly run into token limits.
I'm curious, for those of you who work like this, what level of subscription do you have?
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#37The biggest principle is codification. Codify everything. For instance, this skill of web development: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vercel-labs/web-interface-... That’s too much for a model to carry in its context while it’s trying to do actual work. Far better is to give that skill.md to a model and have it produce several hundred lines of code with a shebang at the top. Now you haven’t got a skill, you’ve got…
As one often finds with “effective LLM usage” advice, all of those things would help humans on the team as well! As would other advice like keeping the architecture docs up to date, writing down important design decisions with rationale, breaking big features down into steps, etc.
Maybe one should just search for advice from the last 20 years on how to make a human development team more effective, and do that stuff.
It’s funny how this advice has always been around, but we needed to invent this new kind of idiot savant developer to get the human developers to want to do it…
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having AI generate tests is technical debt unless what you're doing is extremely trivial and well-trodden in which case you can basically gen all of the code and not care at all. Tests are where the moat still exists because prior to creating tests the outcomes are unverifiable.
As somewhat of an AI-agnostic, I disagree. Writing tests is one of the things I find most useful about copilot. Of course you need to review them first correctness, but (especially for unit tests) it’s pretty good and getting it right first-time.
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Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#39One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed. This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it…
I've been trying to use workflows like this, but I quickly run into token limits. I'm curious, for those of you who work like this, what level of subscription do you have?
I'm on the $200/month Max plan.
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#40I actually kind of do the opposite to most developers.
Instead of having it write the code, I try to use it like a pair reviewer, critiquing as I go.
I ask it questions like "is it safe to pass null here", "can this function panic?", etc.
Or I'll ask it for opinions when I second guess my design choices. Sometimes I just want an authoritative answer to tell me my instincts are right.
So it becomes more like an extra smart IDE.
Actually writing code shouldn't be that mechanical. If it is, that may signify a lack of good abstractions. And some mechanical code is actually quite satisfying to write anyway.