dont forget to include "pls don't make mistakes"
Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
41–50 of 491 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#42Using 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…
That's a fun idea. How do you get the transcript into Claude Code (or whatever you use)? What transcription service do you use?
There are a few apps nowadays for voice transcription. I've used Wispr Flow and Superwhisper, and both seem good. You can map some hotkey (e.g., ctrl + windows) to start recording, then when you press it again to stop, it'll get pasted into whatever text box you have open
Superwhisper offers some AI post-processing of the text (e.g., making nice bullets or grammar), but this doesn't seem necessary and just makes things a bit slower
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#43Hey, 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 add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#44Hey, 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 add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. How big is that file now? How big is too big?
Try to keep it under 1k tokens or so. We will show you a warning if it might be too big.
Ours is maybe half that size. We remove from it with every model release since smarter models need less hand-holding.
You can also break up your CLAUDE.md into smaller files, link CLAUDE.mds, or lazy load them only when Claude works in nested dirs.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#45Hey, 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 add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week.
This concerns me because fighting tooling is not a positive thing. It’s very negative and indicates how immature everything is.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#46Using 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…
surprised ai companies are not making this workflow possible instead of leaving it upto users to figure out how to get voice text into prompt.
> surprised ai companies are not making this workflow possible instead of leaving it upto users to figure out how to get voice text into prompt.
Claude on macOS and iOS have native voice to text transcription. Haven't tried it but since you can access Claude Code from the apps now, I wonder if you use the Claude app's transcription for input into Claude Code.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#47Using 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…
Thanks for the advice! Could you please share how did you enable voice transcription for your setup and what it actually is?
I'm using Wispr flow, but I've also tried Superwhisper. Both are fine. I have a convenient hotkey to start/end recording with one hand. Having it just need one hand is nice. I'm using this with the Claude Code vscode extension in Cursor. If you go down this route, the Claude Code instance should be moved into a separate window outside your main editor or else it'll flicker a lot
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#48AI is great at pattern matching. Set up project instructions that give several examples of old code, new code and detailed explanations of choices made. Also add a negative prompt, a list of things you do not want AI to do based on past frustrations.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#49Hey, 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 add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. This concerns me because fighting tooling is not a positive thing. It’s very negative and indicates how immature everything is.
You might be misunderstanding what a CLAUDE.md is. It’s not about fighting the model, rather it’s giving the model a shortcut to get the context it needs to do its work. You don’t have to have one. Ours is 100% written by Claude itself.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#50I learned the hard way, when Claude has 2 conflicting information in Claude.md it tends to ignore both. So, precise language is key, don't use terms like 'object', which may have different meanings in different fields.