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Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#41

Post by wrs »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #32
simonw wrote: post #11

One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed. This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it…

Half my visits to HN are to check out a comment that explains the right uv inline dep syntax #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script # /// script # dependencies = [ # "requests so i can tell claude to write a self contained script it can later use.

Huh. I just tell Claude “write a self contained uv script” and it does that fine by itself.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#42

Post by sqircles »

I recently took a job maintaining and extending the functionality of an enterprise Enterprise Asset Management product through its own scripting and xml-soup ecosystem. Since it is such a closed system with a much smaller dataset of documentation and examples, it has been great at using what it does know to help me navigate and understand the product as a whole, and how to think of things in regard to how this product works behind the scenes in the code I cannot see.

It doesn't write the code for me, but I talk to it like it is a personal technical consultant on this product and it has been very helpful.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#43

Post by sanderjd »

mjr00 wrote: post #23

If I know what I want to code and it's a purely mechanical exercise to code it, I'll just tell Claude what to do and it does it. Pretty neat. When I don't know what I want to do, I read existing code, think about it, and figure it out. Sometimes I'll sketch out ideas by writing code, then when I have something I like I'll get Claude to take my sketch as an example and having it go forward. The big mistake I see peopl…

Yep, I've always tried to live by the two classic XKCDs about automating things: https://xkcd.com/1319/ and https://xkcd.com/1205/.

I think these calculations are very different now that we have these very good LLMs, but they aren't irrelevant.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#45

Post by anditherobot »

tomduncalf wrote: post #33
anditherobot wrote: post #28

We're overlooking a critical metric in AI-assisted development: Token and Context Window to Utility Ratio . AI coding tools are burning massive token budgets on boilerplate thousands of tokens just to render simple interfaces. Consider the token cost of "Hello World": - Tkinter : `import tkinter as tk; tk.Button(text="Hello").pack()` - React : 500MB of node_modules, and dependencies Right now context windows token li…

But the model doesn't need to read the node_modules to write a React app, it just needs to write the React code (which it is heavily post-trained to be able to use). So the fair counter example is like: function Hello() { return Hello }

Fair challenge to the idea. But what i am saying is that every line of boilerplate, every import statement, every configuration file consumes precious tokens.

The more code, the more surface area the LLM needs to cover before understanding or implementing correctly.

Right now the solution to expensive token limits is the most token-efficient technology. let's reframe it better. Was react made to help humans organize code better or machines?

Is the High Code-to-Functionality Ratio 3 lines that do real work > 50 lines of setup really necessary?

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#46

Post by maCDzP »

I use CLAUDE.md to describe the project. I use Claude to help write the spec. Then I let it run. When the context gets too crammed, I have it build SKILLS.md. I’ll probably have it rewrite CLAUDE.md after a while. Then it will write tests, deployment scripts, commit messages. Yeah, everything.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#47

Post by ozim »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #25

The biggest principle is codification. Codify everything. For instance, this skill of web development: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vercel-labs/web-interface-... That’s too much for a model to carry in its context while it’s trying to do actual work. Far better is to give that skill.md to a model and have it produce several hundred lines of code with a shebang at the top. Now you haven’t got a skill, you’ve got…

Watch out for Waste of context, whatever can be checked by existing linting/testing tooling and returned as an exact message to the model/agent the better.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#49

Post by jarrettcoggin »

simonw wrote: post #11

One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed. This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it…

Are you doing this for non-library projects as well? I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of packaging a microservice using this mechanism (I haven't heard of this before now).

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#50

Post by wreath »

zero_shift wrote: post #40

I actually kind of do the opposite to most developers. Instead of having it write the code, I try to use it like a pair reviewer, critiquing as I go. I ask it questions like "is it safe to pass null here", "can this function panic?", etc. Or I'll ask it for opinions when I second guess my design choices. Sometimes I just want an authoritative answer to tell me my instincts are right. So it becomes more like an extra…

I actually started doing this for side projects that I use as a vehicle for learning and not necessarily to solve a problem and it's been great. 1) I don't feel like I just commissioned someone to do something and I half-ass checking it and 2) I actually do learn about new stuff as well even though sometimes it distracts me from the goal (but that's on me)
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