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

What works:

-Just pasting the error and askig what's going on here.

-"How do I X in Y considering Z?"

-Single-use scripts.

-Tab (most of the time), although that doesn't seem to be Claude.

What doesn't:

-Asking it to actually code. It's not going to do the whole thing and even if, it will take shortcuts, occasionally removing legitimate parts of the application.

-Tests. Obvious cases it can handle, but once you reach a certain threshold of coverage, it starts producing nonsense.

Overall, it's amazing at pattern matching, but doesn't actually understand what it's doing. I had a coworker like this - same vibe.

I have to very much be in the loop and constantly guiding it with clarifying questions but it has made running multiple projects in parallel much easier and has handled many tedious tasks.

For throw away code, I might let the agent do some stuff. For example, we needed to test timing on DNS name resolution on a large number of systems to try and track down if that was causing our intermittent failures. I let an agent write that and was able to get results faster than if I did it myself, and I ultimately didn’t have to care about the how… I just needed something to show to the network team to prove it was their problem.

For larger projects that need to plugin to the legacy code base, which I’ll need to maintain for years, I still prefer to do things myself, using AI here and there as previously mentioned to help with little things. It can also help finding bugs more quickly (no more spending hours looking for a comma).

I had an agent refactor something I was making for a larger project. It did it, and it worked, but it didn’t write it in a way that made sense to my brain. I think others on my team would have also had trouble supporting it too. It took something relatively simple and added so many layers to it that it was hard to keep all the context in my head to make simple edits or explain to someone else how it worked. I might borrow some of the ideas it had, but will ultimately write my own solution that I think will be easier for other people to read and maintain.

Borrowing some of these ideas and doing it myself also allows me to continue to learn and grow, so I have more tools in my tool belt. With the DNS thing that was totally vibe coded, there were some new things in there I hadn’t done before. While the code made sense when I skimmed through it, I didn’t learn anything from that effort. I couldn’t do anything it did again without asking AI to do it again. Long-term, I think this would be a problem.

Other people on my team have been using AI to write their docs. This has been awful. Usually they don’t write anything at all, but at least then I know they didn’t writing anything. The AI docs are simply wrong, 100% hallucinations. I have to waste time checking the doc against the code to figure that out and then go to the person that did it to make them fix it. Sometimes no doc is better than a bad doc.

If they're handing you broken code call them out on it. Say this doesn't do what it says it does, did you want me to create a story for redoing all this work?