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Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
311–320 of 491 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#312[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#313Claude has been miserable for anything Java related, in my experience. Use it maybe as a cross check for ChatGPT, which is far superior. They both make mistakes, but Claude repeatedly changes course, contradicts itself, or makes suggestions that are basically unusable. I don't understand why conversations here are always focusing on a bad LLM.
You likely need to provide it with more direction in your prompts.
I use the same prompts I used for others. Then I rephrased and expanded. This did not improve the quality of responses.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
You likely need to provide it with more direction in your prompts.
I use the same prompts I used for others. Then I rephrased and expanded. This did not improve the quality of responses.
Have you tried prompting the loop? Something like "keep trying until is happy?"
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#315I've had one situation in which I was able to get a 20X productivity boost. I needed to do a large number of similarish things. I carefully hand coded one, created an AGENTS.md that explained everything in a lot of detail and then went to town on generation.
Everything went well and I knew what to expect so reviewing the code was quick.
The experience was super great. I was a 20X AI boosted engineer for a bit. But, I haven't had that situation again.
Anyway, I would say, try to find areas of the code that fit this model if you can. AI is phenomenal for this use case.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#316Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. A few tips: 1. If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. I add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. 2. Use Plan mode (press shift-tab 2x). Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan b…
I would LOVE to use Opus 4.5, but it means I (a merely Pro peon) can work for maybe 30 minutes a day, instead of 60-90.
I’m old enough to remember being able to work at programming related tasks without any such tools. Is that not still a thing?
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#317Get better at reviewing code
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#318Start with a problem. I'm building https://helppet.ai, a voice agent for Veterinarians. I didn't know anything about AI programming other than absolute fundamentals I learned in 2017 through Stanford AI course - this was just theory and a lot has changed. I followed startups doing solving similar problems, and I asked detailed questions to everyone I could. I went to AI hack events to learn techniques others are using. Eventually I ended up with something pretty great and had fun doing so. So start with a problem and then work backwards.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#319Using voice transcription is nice for fully expressing what you want, so the model doesn't need to make guesses. I'm often voicing 500-word prompts. If you talk in a winding way that looks awkward when in text, that's fine. The model will almost certainly be able to tell what you mean. Using voice-to-text is my biggest suggestion for people who want to use AI for programming (I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can…
> I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can go 70-90 WPM on a typing test. However, this speed drops quickly when I need to also think about what I'm saying. Typing that fast is also kinda tiring, whereas talking/thinking at 100-120 WPM feels comfortable. This doesn't feel relatable at all to me. If my writing speed is bottlenecked by thinking about what I'm writing, and my talking speed is significantly faster, that…
It's often better to segregate creative and inhibitive systems even if you need the inhibitive systems to produce a finished work. There's a (probably apocryphal) conversation between George RR Martin and Stephen King that goes something like:
GRRM: How do you write so many books?... Don't you ever spend hours staring at the page, agonizing over which of two words to use, and asking 'am I actually any good at this?'
SK: Of course! But not when I'm writing.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
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