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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?

#421

Post by vel0city »

flash_us0101 wrote: post #415

Most replies here are about writing code faster. But there's a gap nobody's talking about: AI agents are completely blind to running systems. When you hit a runtime bug, the agent's only tool is "let me add a print statement and restart". That works for simple cases but it's the exact same log-and-restart loop we fall back to in cloud and containerized environments, just with faster typing. Where it breaks down: timi…

I've used agents to look at traces, stack dumps, and have used them to control things like debuggers. I've had them exec into running containers and poke around. I've had them examine metrics, look into existing logs, look at pcaps, and more. Any kind of command I could type into a console they can do, and they can reason about the outputs of such a command.

In fact last night I had it hacking away at a Wordpress template. It was making changes and then checking screenshots from a browser window automatically confirming it's changes worked as planned.

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

#422

Post by spicyusername »

avadodin wrote: post #276
spicyusername wrote: post #107

Originally my workflow was: - Think about requirement - Spend 0-360 minutes looking through the code - Start writing code - Realize I didn't think about it quite enough and fix the design - Finish writing code - Write unit tests - Submit MR - Fix MR feedback Until recently no LLM was able to properly disrupt that, however the release of Opus 4.5 changed that. Now my workflow is: - Throw as much context into Opus as p…

Odd how you add the time for the requirement analysis but none for the coding. Then you tell us you leave 83% of the analysis —and the coding— to a code chatbot. Are you actually more productive or are you going to find out down the line the chatbot missed some requirements and made APIs up to fill up a downstream document and now you better support them by yesterday? In ye olden days, people doing this would scream…

To be honest, I didn't think too hard about it. I just fired and submitted with the time estimates in there kind of randomly.

You are clearly a naysayer. I get it. I was one too for a long time. Then I found a workflow and a model that was clearly delivering results and that's what I use now.

It's only a matter of time before it happens to everyone, even you. Once you have the aha moment where it works for you, you'll stop asking everyone whether they really know if it's better.

The LLM-based workflow above produces good code at a speed at least as fast as my previous workflow and typically many, many, many times faster with the code produced often using designs I would have never thought of before being able to bounce ideas off an LLM first. The biggest difference, besides the time obviously, is that the energy I need to spend is in very different places between the two.

Before it was thinking about what I needed to do and writing the code.

Now it's thinking about what I need to do and reviewing the code.

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

#423

Post by miiiiiike »

It’s like working with the dumbest, most arrogant intern you could imagine. It has perfect recall of the docs but no understating of them.

An example from last week:

Me: Do this.

AI: OK.

Me: Not quite, you didn’t take this into account. But I made the same mistake while learning so I can pull it back on track.

AI: OK

…

40 minutes go by. The simplest, smallest bit of code is almost right.

Me: Alright, abstract it into a Sass mixin.

AI: OK.

At which point I just give up and hand code the thing in 10 minutes.

It would be neat if AI worked. It doesn’t.

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

#424

Post by karmasimida »

lazy_afternoons wrote: post #408

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…

HN is in denial, which is understandable

AI is already better at understanding code than 99.99% of human, the more I use it the more I believe this is true. It can draw connections between dots far quicker and accurate than a human could ever be.

At very least, AI is going to be a must even as a co-supervisor to your project

What in doubt right now, is whether AI can manage a codebase fully autonomously without bring it down, which I doubt it can at the moment. Be it 4.6 or 5.4, they always, almost always, add code instead of removing them, the sheer complexity will explode at certain point.

But that is my assessment for models TODAY, who knows where they will end up being in 6 months. AI is entering the recursive self improvement phase, that roadmap is laying in front our eyes, what it can and would unlock is truly, truly unpredictable.

I am both intrigued and scared.

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

#425

Post by robohydrate »

I just started a new job. A mix of JS, WASM (C++) and Python. It's been a blessing to help understand and explain an unfamiliar codebase to me. Sometimes the analysis isn't deep enough but I've been able to create enough guiding documents to get it right most of the way through, and for the rest I can continue and dive deeper on my own with further prompting.

I've started using it to write some code, which I then use further prompting to review before my own final review. I feel a lot more productive, I can focus on high level ideas and not think about tiny implementation details.

Having instrumentation code magically created in minutes and being able to validate assumptions before/after making changes by doing manual testing and feeding AI logs has been a great use for me - this kind of stuff is boring and would kill my motivation and productivity in the past. AI helps here so I can move on to the fun stuff, helps me stay engaged and interested.

It's great for writing unit tests and doing log analysis. The usual AI pitfalls apply like going into loops that lead nowhere and hallucinating things, but I've gotten better at spotting it and steering it away. I try not to take what it gives me at face value and use follow up prompts to challenge assumptions or verify things.

So overall, it's been an immense help for me. I've got some interesting projects coming up that are more greenfield work, we'll see if this holds up compared to an existing codebase.

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

#426

Post by GMoromisato »

I'm working on a startup, mostly writing C++, and I'm using AI more and more. In the last month I have one machine running Codex working on task while I work on a different machine.

I have to think like micro-manager, coming up with discrete (and well-defined) tasks for the AI to do, and I periodically review the code to make it cleaner/more efficient.

But I'm confident that it is saving me time. And my love for programming has not diminished. I'm still driving the architecture and writing code, but now I have a helper who makes progress in parallel.

Honestly, I don't want to go back.

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

#427

Post by hoosieree »

theshrike79 wrote: post #305
viccis wrote: post #268

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but the worst part for me is that a lot of management LOVES to use Claude to generate 50 page design documents, PRDs, etc., and send them to us to "please review as soon as you can". Nobody reads it, not even the people making it. I'm watching some employees just generate endless slide decks of nonsense and then waffle when asked any specific questions. If any of that is read, it is b…

If you shove clearly AI generated content at me, I will use an AI to summarize it. Or I'll walk up to your desk and ask you to explain it.

"send me your prompts instead"

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

#428

Post by citizenkeen »

vdfs wrote: post #418
DalekBaldwin wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jump straight to the second option. You have to presume that the content they sent you has no relation whatsoever to their actual understanding of the matter.

Be prepared for "I Asked claude and it said: ..." at some point you will just ask claude via a microphone

We all use Claude at my work and I have a very strict rule for my boss and my team: we don’t say “I asked Claude”. We use it a lot, but I expect my team to own it.

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

#429

Post by contingencies »

Replying before reading anyone else's responses because I want to provide an honest response. I absolutely love it. I've spent my career as a generalist focusing on architecture and plumbing problems, mostly on Linux and embedded. Coding was something I did to get things done, now I can get things done in new languages incredibly fast, debug annoying problems rapidly, and work on new architectures very rapidly. It does a lot of the annoying research work: interpreting novel build chain failures, tracking down version-related API changes, gathering evidence of popular reports on the large plurality of Apple kernel lockdown changes that perenially break embedded work, etc. I'm working in hardware. Electronics. Physics. Mechanical. Supply chain. Software. EVERYTHING. It's a goddamn superpower. I can't get enough of it. It's like every teacher you ever wanted always available with infinite patience. I've stopped typing a lot of prompts now and started using local voice transcription. It's fantastic.

Honestly, the question may have been a bit more on the programming (generating lines) side, but I've always described programming as a lot like cleaning. You enter the room, figure out the nature of the mess (the interesting part) and come up with your strategy for solving it, then spend ages cleaning, sweeping or mopping up which is largely boring. Now you don't have to bother. Thanks, LLMs.

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

#430

Post by clintonb »

humbleharbinger wrote: post #213

I'm an engineer at Amazon - we use Kiro (our own harness) with Opus 4.6 underneath. Most of my gripes are with the harness, CC is way better. In terms of productivity I'm def 2-4X more productive at work, >10x more productive on my side business. I used to work overtime to deliver my features. Now I work 9-5 and am job hunting on the side while delivering relatively more features. I think a lot of people are missing…

> make a code change and then deploy the changes to gamma and verify they work by making a sample request and verifying output from cloudwatch logs etc

This has been a godsend over the past week while deploying a couple services. One is a bridge between Linear and our Coder.com installation so folks can assign the work to an agent. Claude Code can do most of the work while I sleep since it has access to kubectl, Linear MCP, and Coder MCP. I no longer have to manually build, deploy, test, repeat. It just does it all for me!

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