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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?

#351

Post by reachableceo »

er453r wrote: post #288

For my specific niche (medical imaging) all current models still suck. The amount of expert knowledge required to understand the data and display it in the right way - probably never was in the training set. We have this one performance-critical 3D reconstruction engine part, that just just has to go FAST through billions of voxels. From time to time we try to improve it, by just a bit. I have probably wasted at leas…

Did you feed back the results of the tests / benchmark to the model?

I’m presuming you have a very robust test framework / benchmark setup etc?

I’m presuming you fed the model the baseline results of that setup as a starting point ?

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

#352

Post by GeoAtreides »

rckclmbr wrote: post #139
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you aren't doing this level of work by now, you will be automated soon. It's harder and harder to detect sarcasm these days but in case you're being serious, I've tested a similar setup and I noticed Claude produces perfectly plausible code that has very subtle bugs that get harder and harder to notice. In the end, the initial speedup was gone and I decided to rewrite everything by hand. I'm working on a product…

I keep hearing “Claude creates subtle bugs”, but how is that different than people engineers? I’ve never worked in a bug free codebase

simple: people produce subtle subtle bugs, LLMs produce obvious subtle bugs.

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

#353

Post by DefineOutside »

I work at a large company that is contracted to build warehouses that automate the movement of goods with conveyors, retrieval systems, etc.

This is a key candidates to use AI as we have built hundreds of warehouses in the past. We have a standard product that spans over a hundred thousand lines of code to build upon. Still, we rely on copying code from previous projects if features have been implemented before. We have stopped investing in the product to migrate everything to microservices, for some reason, so this code copying is increasingly common as projects keep getting more complex.

Teams to implement warehouses are generally around eight developers. We are given a design spec to implement, which usually spans a few hundred pages.

AI has over doubled the speed at which I can write backend code. We've done the same task so many times before with previous warehouses, that we have a gold mine of patterns that AI can pick up on if we have a folder of previous projects that it can read. I also feel that the code I write is higher quality, though I have to think more about the design as previously I would realize something wouldn't work whilst writing the code. At GWT though, it's hopeless as there's almost no public GWT projects to train an AI on. It's also very helpful in tracing logs and debugging.

We use Cursor. I was able to use $1,300 tokens worth of Claude Opus 4.6 for a cost of $100 to the company. Sadly, Cursor discontinued it's legacy pricing model due to it being unsustainable, so only the non-frontier models are priced low enough to consistently use. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when this new pricing model takes affect tomorrow, I guess I will have to go back to writing code by hand or figure out how to use models like Gemini 3.1. GPT models also write decent code, but they are always so paranoid and strictly follow prompts to their own detriment. Gemini just feels unstable and inconsistent, though it does write higher quality code.

I'm not being paid any more for doubling my output, so it's not the end of the world if I have to go back to writing code by hand.

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

#354

Post by archagon »

wcedmisten wrote: post #133
turlockmike wrote: post #96

[flagged]

> Software engineering is a mostly solved problem at this point I guess that's why Claude Code has 0 open issues on Github. Since software engineering is solved, their autonomous agents can easily fix their own software much better and faster than human devs. They can just add "make no mistakes" to their prompt and the model can solve any problem! Oh wait, they have 5,000+ open issues on Github[1]. I'm yet to be conv…

Indeed. In my view, "software engineering is a solved problem" is a roughly equivalent statement to "writing is a solved problem." I'm convinced that people who say this were never serious engineers to begin with, viewing code entirely as a means to an end.

To me, code is both the canvas and deterministic artifact of deep thinking about program logic and data flow, as well as a way to communicate these things to other developers (including myself in the future). Outsourcing that to some statistical amalgam implies that the engineering portion of software engineering is no longer relevant. And maybe it's not for your run-of-the-mill shovelware, but as a profession I'd like to think we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that.

Also, does the sum total of software engineering done up to this point provide a sufficient training set for all future engineering? Are we really "done"? That sounds absurd to me.

I think people spouting absolutist statements like "software engineering is a solved problem" should largely be ignored.

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

#355

Post by tokioyoyo »

0x6d61646f wrote: post #332
philipp-gayret wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We use it daily in our org. What you’re talking about is not happening. That being said, we have fairly decent mono repo structure, bunch of guides/skills to ensure it doesn’t do it that often. Also the whole plan + implement phases.

If it was July 2025, I would have agreed with you. But not anymore.

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

#356

Post by tasty_freeze »

I have mostly been using the Claude Sonnet models as they release each new one.

It is great for getting an overview on a pile of code that I'm not familiar with.

It has debugged some simple little problems I've had, eg, a complex regex isn't behaving so I'll give it the regex and a sample string and ask, "why isn't this matching" and it will figure out out.

I've used it only a little for writing new code. In those cases I will write the shell of a subroutine and a comment saying what the subroutine takes in and what it returns, then ask the LLM to fill in the body. Then I review it.

It has been useful for translating ancient perl scripts into something more modern, like python.

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

#357

Post by jacquesm »

mohsen1 wrote: post #313
jacquesm wrote: post #31

For those of you for who it is working: show your code, please.

Hers is one: https://github.com/mohsen1/fesh beats the best compression out there by 6% on average. Yet nobody will care because it was not hand written

That's a very interesting case. If you want I will look into this in more detail, I'm waiting for some parts so I have some time to kill.

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

#358

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#360

Post by CharlesW »

jgilias wrote: post #229
frumiousirc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blanket follow-up "are you sure this is the best way to do it?" Frequently returns, "Oh, you are absolutely correct, let me redo this part better."

You should start a new session for the code review to make sure the context window is not polluted with the work on implementation itself. At the end of the day it’s an autocomplete. So if you ask “are you sure?” then “oh, actually” is a statistically likely completion.

> You should start a new session for the code review to make sure the context window is not polluted with the work on implementation itself.

I'm just a sample size of one, but FWIW I didn't find that this noticably improved my results.

Not having to completely recreate all the LLM context neccessary to understand the literal context and the spectrum of possible solutions (which the LLM still "knows" before you clear the session) saves lots of time and tokens.

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