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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?

#401

Post by IncreasePosts »

turlockmike wrote: post #118
IncreasePosts wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly do you think people not doing that kind of work will be automated but your kind of work won't be automated? If AI really is all that, then whatever "special" thing you are doing will be automated as well.

I don't disagree, aspects of that will be automated, but two things will remain: Intent and Judgement. Building AI systems will be about determining the right thing to build and ensuring your AI system fully understands it. For example, I have a trading bot that trades. I spent a lot of time on refining the optimization statement for the AI. If you give it the wrong goal or there's any ambiguity, it can go down the w…

How technical do you need to be with your optimization statements and outcome checking? Isn't that moat constantly shrinking if AI is constantly getting better?

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

#403

Post by ex-aws-dude »

turlockmike wrote: post #116
relativeadv wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool. What have you built with this method? Do you mind sharing details about the kinds of projects?

I mostly do this for work. These days I'm mostly building tooling for other devs. Observable memory system for coding, PR automation, CLI apps, dev coding dashboard, email automation. All of it integrating AI at various points (where intelligence is useful). All of that in the last two months alone. Claude code skills represent a new type of AI native program. Give your agent the file system, let it build tools to sy…

So you think your experience building tools for other devs is the same as every other domain of software to the point that you would declare the whole field of software engineering is a solved problem?

Gamedev, systems programming, embedded development, 3D graphics, audio programming, mobile, desktop, physics/simulation programming, HPC, RTC, etc.. that’s all solved based on your experience?

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

#404

Post by vemv »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #41

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 co…

Have you perceived a market shift for freelancers given the rise of AI coding?

It seems to me that sadly, paying for getting a few isolated tasks done is becoming a thing of the past.

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

#405

Post by BoneShard »

ionwake wrote: post #393
BoneShard wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticied what previously would take 30 mins, now takes a week. For example we had a performance issue with a DB, previously I'd just create a GSI (global secondary index), now there is a 37 page document with explanation, mitigation, planning, steps, reviews, risks, deployment plan, obstacles and a bunch of comments, but sure it looks cool and very professional.

Im now out of the workforce and can’t even imagine the complexity of the systems as management and everyone else communicate plans and executions through Claude. It must already be the case that some code based are massive behemoths few devs understand. Is Claude good enough to help maintain and help devs stay on top of the codebase?

The code is fine, strong reviews help and since we're slower due to all slop communication also helps.

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

#406

Post by IncreasePosts »

turlockmike wrote: post #116
relativeadv wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool. What have you built with this method? Do you mind sharing details about the kinds of projects?

I mostly do this for work. These days I'm mostly building tooling for other devs. Observable memory system for coding, PR automation, CLI apps, dev coding dashboard, email automation. All of it integrating AI at various points (where intelligence is useful). All of that in the last two months alone. Claude code skills represent a new type of AI native program. Give your agent the file system, let it build tools to sy…

Why are you building tools for other humans? Why are they programming in this world where you aren't programming but are also an insanely productive programmer?

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

#407

Post by luisgvv »

On my side I have used Claude code, tbh for solo projects it's good enough if you already know what you need to do.

Answering your questions:

On my job we've been spoon fed to use GH copilot everywhere we can. It's been configured to review PRs, make corrections etc. - I'd say it's good enough but from time to time it will raise false positives on issues. I'd say it works fine but you still need to keep an eye on generated BS.

I've seen coworkers show me amazing stuff done with agentic coding and I've seen coworkers open up slop PRs with bunch of garbage generated code which is kind of annoying, but I'll let it slide...

Stack - .NET, Angular, SQL Server and ofc hosted in Azure.

Team is composed of about 100 engineers (devs, QA, devops etc.) and from what I can see there are no Juniors, which is sad to see if you ask me

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

#408

Post by lazy_afternoons »

Surprised to see HN being bearish on this.

I have 10 years of experience. I am a reasonable engineer. I can tell you that about half of the hype on twitter is real. It is a real blessing for small teams.

We have 100k DAU for a consumer crud app. We built and maintain everything in-house with 3 engineers. This would have taken atleast 10 engineers 3-4 years back.

We don't have a bug list. We are not "vibe coding" , 2 of us understand almost all of the codebase. We have processes to make sure the core integrity of codebase doesn't go for a toss.

None has touched the editor in months.

Even the product folks can raise a PR for small config changes from slack.

Velocity is through the roof and code quality is as good if not better than when we write by hand.

We refactor almost A LOT more than before because we can afford to.

I love it.

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

#409

Post by christophilus »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #285

Net negative. I do find it genuinely useful for code review, and "better search engine" or snippets, and sometimes for rubber ducking, but for agent mode and actual longer coding tasks I always end up rewriting the code it makes. Whatever it produces always looks like one of those students who constantly slightly misunderstands and only cares about minor test objectives, never seeing the big picture. And I waste so m…

Same. I vacillate between thinking our profession will soon be over to thinking we’re perfectly safe. Sometimes, it’s brilliant. It is very good at exploring and explaining a codebase, finding bugs, and doing surgical fixes. It’s sometimes good at programming larger tasks, but only if you really don’t care about code quality.

The one thing I’m not sure about is: does code quality and consistency actually matter? If your architecture is sufficiently modular, you can quickly and inexpensively regenerate any modules whose low quality proves to be problematic.

So, maybe we really are fucked. I don’t know.

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

#410

Post by jsunderland323 »

ramoz wrote: post #256

Right now I enjoy the labs' cli harnesses, Claude Code, and Codex (especially for review). I do a bunch of niche stuff with Pi and OpenCode. My productivity is up. Some nuances with working with others using the same AI tools- we all end up trying to boil the ocean at first- creating a ton of verbose docs and massive PRs, but I/they end up regressing on throwing up every sort of LLM output we get. Instead, we contino…

I've been working on a thing for worktrees to work with docker-compose setups so you can run multiple localhost environments at once https://coasts.dev/. It's free and open source. In my experience it's made worktrees 10x better but would love to hear what other folks are doing about things like port conflicts and db isolation.
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