Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 657 posts

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

#41

Post by QuadrupleA »

As a veteran freelance developer - aside from some occasional big wins, I'd say it's been net neutral or even net negative to my productivity. When I review AI-generated code carefully (and if I'm delivering it to clients I feel that's my responsibility) I always find unnecessary complexity, conceptual errors, performance issues, looming maintainability problems, etc. If I were to let it run free, these would just compound.

A couple "win" examples: add in-text links to every term in this paragraph that appears elsewhere on the page, plus corresponding anchors in the relevant page parts. Or, replace any static text on this page with any corresponding dynamic elements from this reference URL.

Lose examples: constant, but edit format glitches (not matching searched text; even the venerable Opus 4.6 constantly screws this up), unnecessary intermediate variables, ridiculously over-cautious exception-handling, failing to see opportunities to isolate repeated code into a function, or to utilize an existing function that exactly implements said N lines of code, etc.

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

#42

Post by simonw »

The majority of code I've written since November 2025 has been created using agents, as opposed to me typing code into a text editor. More than half of that has been done from my iPhone via Claude Code for web (bad name, great software.)

I'm enjoying myself so much. Projects I've been thinking about for years are now a couple of hours of hacking around. I'm readjusting my mental model of what's possible as a single developer. And I'm finally learning Go!

The biggest challenge right now is keeping up with the review workload. For low stakes projects (small single-purpose HTML+JS tools for example) I'm comfortable not reviewing the code, but if it's software I plan to have other people use I'm not willing to take that risk. I have a stack of neat prototypes and maybe-production-quality features that I can't ship yet because I've not done that review work.

I mainly work as an individual or with one other person - I'm not working as part of a larger team.

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

#43

Post by dondraper36 »

It’s a fantastic performance booster for a lot of mundane tasks like writing and revising design docs, tests, debugging (using it like a super smart and active rubber duck), and system design discussions.

I also use it as a final check on all my manually written code before sending it for code review.

With all that said, I have this weird feeling that my ability to quickly understand and write code is no longer noticeable, nor necessary.

Everyone now ships tons of code and even if I do the same without any LLM, the default perception will be that it has been generated.

I am not depressed about it yet, but it will surely take a while to embrace the new reality in its entirety

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

#45

Post by eranation »

Tade0 wrote: post #34

Daily Claude user via Cursor. What works: -Just pasting the error and askig what's going on here. -"How do I X in Y considering Z?" -Single-use scripts. -Tab (most of the time), although that doesn't seem to be Claude. What doesn't: -Asking it to actually code. It's not going to do the whole thing and even if, it will take shortcuts, occasionally removing legitimate parts of the application. -Tests. Obvious cases it…

Opus 4.5 max (1m tokens) and above were the tipping point for me, before that, I agree with 100% of what you said.

But even with Opus 4.6 max / GPT 5.4 high it takes time, you need to provide the right context, add skills / subagents, include tribal knowledge, have a clear workflow, just like you onboard a new developer. But once you get there, you can definitely get it to do larger and larger tasks, and you definitely get (at least the illusion) that it "understands" that it's doing.

It's not perfect, but definitely can code entire features, that pass rigorous code review (by more than one human + security scanners + several AI code reviewers that review every single line and ensure the author also understands what they wrote)

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

#46

Post by teg4n_ »

lazystar wrote: post #3

my team is anti-AI. my code review requests are ignored, or are treated more strictly than others. it feels coordinated - i will have to push back the launch date of my project as a result. another teammate added a length check to an input field, and his request was merged near instantly, even though it had zero unit testing. this team is incredibly cooked in the long term, i just need to ensure that i survive the sh…

it sounds like you might have wasted your team's time previously and now they don't trust the code you put up with a PR. Maybe you can do something to improve your relationship with them?

As a sidenote, I highly doubt they are cooked longterm. Using AI is not exactly skilled labor. If they want or need I'm sure they could learn patterns/workflows in like an afternoon. As things go on it will only get easier to use.

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

#47

Post by morkalork »

More work, shorter deadlines, smaller headcount, higher expectations in terms of adaptability/transferability of people between projects (who needs knowledge transfer, ask the AI!).

But in the end, the thing that pisses me off was a manager who used it to write tickets. If the product owner doesn't give a shit about the product enough to think and write about what they want, you'll never be successful as a developer.

Otherwise it's pretty cool stuff.

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

#48

Post by jatins »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #10

I work at a FAANG. Professionally, I have had almost no luck with it, outside of summarizing design docs or literally just finding something in the code that a simple search might not find: such is this team's code that does X? I am yet to successfully prompt it and get a working commit. Further, I will add that I also don't know any ICs personally who have successfully used it. Though, there's endless posts of peopl…

Experience depends on which FAANG it is. Amazon for example doesn't allow Claude Code or Codex so you are stuck with whatever internal tool they have

Meta, despite competing with these, is open to let their devs use better off the shelf tools.

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

#50

Post by scuff3d »

eranation wrote: post #21

What you said about "we're all cooked" and "AI is useless" is literally me and everyone I know switching between the two on an hourly basis... I find it the most exciting time for me as a builder, I can just get more things done. Professionally, I'm dreading for our future, but I'm sure it will be better than I fear, worse than I hope. From a toolset, I use the usual, Cursor (Super expensive if you go with Opus 4.6 m…

I've gone back and forth on it a lot myself, but lately I've been more optimistic, for a couple of reasons.

While the final impact LLMs will have is yet to be determined (the hype cycle has to calm down, we need time to see impacts in production software, and there is inevitably going to be some kind of collapse in the market at some point), its undoubtable that it will improve overall productivity (though I think it's going to be far more nuanced then most people think). But with that productivity improvement will come a substantial increase in complexity and demand for work. We see this playout every single time some tool comes along and makes engineers in any field more productive. Those changes will also take time, but I suspect we're going to see a larger number of smaller teams working on more projects.

And ultimately, this change is coming for basically all industries. The only industries that might remain totally unaffected are ones that rely entirely on manual labor, but even then the actual business side of the business will also be impacted. At the end of the day I think it's better to be in a position to understand and (even to a small degree) influence the way things are going, instead of just being along for the ride.

If the only value someone brings is the ability to take a spec from someone else and churn out a module/component/class/whatever, they should be very very worried right now. But that doesn't describe a single software engineer I know.

Post reply on HN