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Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#401

Post by lkjdsklf »

BoorishBears wrote: post #332
lkjdsklf wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only approach that seems even remotely reasonable “Prompt engineering” just seems dumb as hell. It’s literally just an imprecise nondeterministic programming language. Before a couple years so, we all would have said that was a bad language and moved on.

A few years ago we didn't have an imprecise nondeterministic programming language that would allow your mom to achieve SOTA results on a wide range of NLP tasks by asking nicely, or I'm sure people would have taken it. I think a lot of prompt engineering is voodoo, but it's not all baseless: a more formal way to look at it is aligning your task with the pre-training and post-training of the model. The whole "it's a b…

> nondeterministic programming language that would allow your mom to achieve SOTA results

I actually think it's great for giving non-programmers the ability to program to solve basic problems. That's really cool and it's pretty darn good at it.

I would refute that you get SOTA results.

That has never been my personal experience. Given that we don't see a large increase in innovative companies spinning up now that this technology is a few years old, I doubt it's the experience of most users.

> The whole "it's a bad language" refrain feels half-baked when most of us use relatively high level languages on non-realtime OSes that obfuscate so much that they might as well be well worded prompts compared to how deterministic the underlying primitives they were built on are... at least until you zoom in too far.

Obfuscation and abstraction are not the same thing. The other core difference is the precision and the determinism both of which are lacking with LLMs.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#402

Post by mrwrong »

avereveard wrote: post #348
emseetech wrote: post #323

Everyone's suggestions feel designed to frustrate me. Instructions on how to cajole and plead that seem more astrology than engineering. This is the pattern I settled on about a year ago. I use it as a rubber-duck / conversation partner for bigger picture issues. I'll run my code through it as a sanity "pre-check" before a pr review. And I mapped autocomplete to ctrl-; in vim so I only bring it up when I need it. Oth…

> how to cajole and plead When a new person join the team you need to tell them the local coding standard. I don't see why people expect llm to work out of the box instead. The difference is you have to do it at every exchange as llm are stateless. But yeah I mostly agree with the rest llm work best at very low lewel method by method where you can watch like an hawk they don't introduce silent failure condutions and…

> I don't see why people expect llm to work out of the box instead

because it's not a person? because you have to do it all the time? because of the way literally all other software works?

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#403

Post by mrwrong »

justatdotin wrote: post #249
docheinestages wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what really got me moving was dusting off some old text about cognitive styles and team work It would be great if you could provide a summary of these points.

my starting point was Google People Management Essentials. I was thinking about team-level politics at work, and noticed some ideas seemed relevant to how teams in orgs can adopt agents. I pursued that idea more widely with other resources and it resonated. I don't think I have any conclusions to share, just the orientation: to identify and actively accommodate the tool's cognitive style in the same way we do for one…

your suggestion is to treat it like a person but (surprise surprise) you don't have any specific ideas of how and why that works. your idea just sounds like marketing

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#404

Post by lkjdsklf »

BoorishBears wrote: post #347
jakelazaroff wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean, like, scripting languages? Are the underlying primitives C and machine language? "Might as well be well worded prompts" is the overstatement of the century; any given scripting language is far closer to those underlying layers than it is to using natural language with LLMs.

Sure doesn't seem like it. https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/1999317065237512224 And forget scripting languages, take a C program that writes a string to disk and reads it back. How many times longer does it get the moment we have to ensure the string was actually committed to non-volatile NAND and actually read back? 5x? 10x? Is it even doable if we have to support arbitrary consumer hardware?

You're stretching really hard here to try and rationalize your position

First of all, I pick the hardware I support and the operating systems. I can make those things requirements when they are required.

But when you boil down your argument, it's that because one thing may introduce non-determinism, then any degree of non-determinism is acceptable.

At that point we don't even need LLMs. We can just have the computer do random things.

It's just a rehash of the infinite monkeys with infinite type writers which is ridiculous

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#405

Post by exasperaited »

simonw wrote: post #341
hansmayer wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, please, stop misleading people Simon. People use tools to make things easier for them, not harder. And a tool which I cannot steer predictably is not a god damn tool at all! The sheer persistence the AI-promoters like you are willing to invest just to gaslight us all into thinking we were dumb and did not know how to use the shit-generators is really baffling. Understand that a lot of us are early adopters and we…

Your insistence that LLMs are not useful tools is difficult for me to empathize with as someone who has been using them successfully as useful tools for several years - and sharing in great detail how I am using them. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/ is the 37th post in my series about this: https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ is pro…

> I know you absolutely hate being told you're holding them wrong... but you're holding them wrong.

Wow, was that a shark just then?

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#406

Post by dmd »

koolba wrote: post #316
dmd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would LOVE to use Opus 4.5, but it means I (a merely Pro peon) can work for maybe 30 minutes a day, instead of 60-90.

I’m old enough to remember being able to work at programming related tasks without any such tools. Is that not still a thing?

I obviously meant "work with it" not work in general.

And as for old, I'm 47. I've been programming since I got my first C64 in 1985.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#407

Post by AndrewKemendo »

pbasista wrote: post #397
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% concur with this as owner of multiple 20k+ LOC repos with between 10-30% unmodified AI code in production If you treat it like a rubber duck it’s magic If you think the rubber duck is going to think for you then you shouldn’t even start with them.

> 10-30% unmodified AI code in production That is an interesting metric but I think it is not that important. I would be careful with (AI-generated) code that no one at the team understands well. If that kind of code is put into production, it might become a source of dragging technical debt that no one is able to properly address. In my opinion, putting AI-generated code to production is okay, as long it has been re…

We understand it perfectly, which is why it went to production

I didn’t say it wasn’t reviewed, I said it was unmodified

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#408

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

koolba wrote: post #316
dmd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would LOVE to use Opus 4.5, but it means I (a merely Pro peon) can work for maybe 30 minutes a day, instead of 60-90.

I’m old enough to remember being able to work at programming related tasks without any such tools. Is that not still a thing?

If a tool craps out after 30 minutes every day, and someone knows they can't rely upon it to work when you needed it, they tend to change workflow to avoid the tool entirely.

Context switching between AI-assisted coding and "oops, my tool is refusing to function, guess I'll stop using it" is often worse for productivity than never using the AI to begin with.

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#409

Post by jliptzin »

baobun wrote: post #291
jliptzin wrote: post #285

I am probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for this but if you’re going to have AI write your code, you’ll get the most mileage out of letting it do its thing and building tests to make sure everything works. Don’t look at the code it generates - it’s gonna be ugly. Your job is to make sure it does what it’s supposed to. If there’s a bug, tell it what’s wrong and to fix the bug. Let it wade through its own crap…

What is the time of the longest-lived actively developed and deployed codebase where this approach has been successful so far and your co-maintainers aren't screaming bloody murder?

about 1 year

Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

#410

Post by [deleted] »

BoorishBears wrote: post #347
jakelazaroff wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean, like, scripting languages? Are the underlying primitives C and machine language? "Might as well be well worded prompts" is the overstatement of the century; any given scripting language is far closer to those underlying layers than it is to using natural language with LLMs.

Sure doesn't seem like it. https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/1999317065237512224 And forget scripting languages, take a C program that writes a string to disk and reads it back. How many times longer does it get the moment we have to ensure the string was actually committed to non-volatile NAND and actually read back? 5x? 10x? Is it even doable if we have to support arbitrary consumer hardware?

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