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

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

#331

Post by etoxin »

jgilias wrote: post #257
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…

I saw somewhere that you guys had All Hands where juniors were prohibited from pushing AI-assisted code due to some reliability thing going on? Was that just a hoax?

Not a hoax, saw it in the news. I'm not at Amazon but can confirm massive productivity gains. The issue is reviewing code. With output similar to a firehose of PR's we need to be more careful and mindful with PR's. Don't vibe code a massive PR and slap it on your coworkers and expect a review. The same PR etiquette exist today as it did years ago.

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

#332

Post by 0x6d61646f »

philipp-gayret wrote: post #293
Izkata wrote: post #149

I don't use it. I know my mind fairly well, and I know my style of laziness will result in atrophying skills. Better not to risk it. One of my co-workers already admitted as much to me around six months ago, and that he was trying not to use AI for any code generation anymore, but it was really difficult to stop because it was so easy to reach for. Sounded kind of like a drug addiction to me. And I had the impression…

The atrophy of manually writing code is certainly real. I'd compare it to using a paper map and a compass to navigate, versus say Google Maps. I don't particularly care to lose the skill, even though being good and enjoying the programming part of making software was my main source of income for more than a decade. I just can't escape being significantly faster with a Claude Code. > he can tell what it generates is m…

have you tried using AI generated code in a non hobby project? one that has to go to production?

it just allucinates packages, adds random functions that already exist, creates new random APIs.

How is that not unmantainable?

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

#333

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

> I have built features in 2 weeks that would take me a month just because I'd have to learn some nitty technical details that I'd never use again in my life.

In the bucket of "really great things I love about AI", that would definitely be at the top. So often in my software engineering career I'd have to spend tons of time learning and understanding some new technology, some new language, some esoteric library, some cobbled-together build harness, etc., and I always found it pretty discouraging when I knew that I'd never have reason to use that tech outside the particular codebase I was working on at that time. And far from being rare, I found that working in a fairly large company that that was a pretty frequent occurrence. E.g. I'd look at a design doc or feature request and think to myself "oh, that's pretty easy and straightforward", only to go into the codebase and see the original developer/team decided on some extremely niche transaction handling library or whatever (or worse, homegrown with no tests...), and trying to figure out that esoteric tech turned into 85% of the actual work. AI doesn't reduce that to 0, but I've found it has been a huge boon to understanding new tech and especially for getting my dev environment and build set up well, much faster than I could do manually.

Of course, AI makes it a lot easier to generate exponentially more poorly architected slop, so not sure if in a year or two from now I'll just be ever more dependent on AI explaining to me the mountains of AI slop created in the first place.

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

#334

Post by FpUser »

>"How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

For me personally - beautifully. Saves me a ton of time. Keep in mind however that I am an old fart who was originally scientist in physics, started programming with entering machine codes and designed electronics to facilitate research and after moving to Canada switching to programming completely. So I understand how everything works starting from the very bottom and am able to see good stuff from the bullshit in what I get from AI.

I however have no idea how would youngsters train their brains when they would not have any solid foundations. I think there is a danger of collapse with people having answers to all the questions but with zero ability to validate those and the AI itself degenerating into noise as a result of more and more being able to train off it's own results.

Or the AI will eventually have intelligence, motivation and agency.

Either way we are fucked.

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

#335

Post by gerdesj »

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…

"I'm an engineer at Amazon"

Sanctioned comment?

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

#336

Post by simonreiff »

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…

Mind my asking why job hunting and what you wish you could do in your day job that you're not?

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

#337

Post by layer8 »

cluckindan wrote: post #298
wg0 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The code despite detailed spec reveals bugs and edge cases upon inspection. I'm talking Claude Opus 4.6 here.

The spec needs to be explicit about edge and corner cases.

At some point such a spec converges to the actual code you’d have written.

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

#338

Post by ivraatiems »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #328

It has definitely made me more productive. That said, that productivity isn't coming from using it to write business logic (I prefer to have an in-depth understanding of the logical parts of the codebases that I'm working on. I've also seen cases in my work codebases where code was obviously AI generated before and ends up with gaping security or compliance issues that no one seemed to see at the time). The productiv…

> Research. It has been extraordinarily helpful in giving me insight into how to design some larger systems when I have extremely specific requirements but don't necessarily have the complete experience to architect them myself - I know enough to understand if the system is going to correctly accomplish the requirements, but not to have necessarily come up with architecture as a whole.

I agree, this is where coding agents really shine for me. Even if they get the details wrong, they often pinpoint where things happen and how quite well.

They're also great for rapid debugging, or assisted bug fixing. Often, I will manually debug a problem, then tell the AI, "This exception occurs in place Y because thing X is happening, here's a stack trace, propose a fix", and then it will do the work of figuring out where to put the fix for me. I already usually know WHAT to do, it's just a matter of WHERE in context. Saves a lot of time.

Likewise, if I have something where I want thing X to do Y, and X already does Z, then I'll say, "Implement a Y that works like Z but for A B C", and it'll usually get it really close on the first try.

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

#340

Post by jghn »

gerdesj wrote: post #335
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…

"I'm an engineer at Amazon" Sanctioned comment?

> 10x more productive on my side business

Pretty sure the answer is here :)

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