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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?

#441

Post by brunooliv »

Couldn’t read the entire comments but, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive so far. I think what helps me be effective is a combination of factors: I work only in a modern, well-documented and well-architected Java codebase with over 80% test coverage.

I only use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 on High Effort.

I always, ALWAYS treat my “new job” as writing a detailed ticket for whatever it is I need to do.

I give the model access to a DB replica of my prod DB that I create manually.

I do NOT waste time with custom agents, Claude.md files or any of that stuff.

When I put ALL of the above together, the results ARE THE PROMISED LAND: I simply haven’t written a single line of code manually in the last 3 months.

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

#442

Post by sroerick »

jacquesm wrote: post #363
sroerick wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one success I had - https://github.com/sroerick/pakkun It's git for ETL. I haven't looked at the code, but I've been using it pretty effectively for the last week or two. I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending it to anybody else, but it was basically one-shotted. I've been dogfooding it on a number of projects, had the LLM iterate on it a bit, and I'm generally very happy with the ergonomics.

That's a nice example, can you explain your 'one shot' setup in some more detail?

I don't have the prompt, but I used codex. I probably wrote a medium sized paragraph explaining the architecture. It scaffolded out the app, and I think I prompted it twice more with some very small bugfixes. That got me to an MVP which I used to build LaTeX pipelines. Since then, I've added a few features out as I've dogfooded it.

It's a bit challenging / frustrating to get LLMs to build out a framework/library and the app that you're using the framework in at the same time. If it hits a bug in the framework, sometimes it will rewrite the app to match the bug rather than fixing the bug. It's kind of a context balancing act, and you have to have a pretty good idea of how you're looking to improve things as you dogfood. It can be done, it takes some juggling, though.

I think LLMs are good at golang, and also good at that "lightweight utility function" class of software. If you keep things skeletal, I think you can avoid a lot of the slop feeling when you get stuck in a "MOVE THE BUTTON LEFT" loop.

I also think that dogfooding is another big key. I coded up a calculator app for a dentist office which 2-3 people use about 25 times a day. Not a lot of moving parts, it's literally just a calculator. It could basically be an excel spreadsheet, except it's a lot better UX to have an app. It wouldn't have been software I'd have written myself, really, but in about 3 total hours of vibecoding, I've had two revisions.

If you can get something to a minimal functional state without a lot of effort, and you can keep your dev/release loop extremely tight, and you use it every day, then over time you can iterate into something that's useful and good.

Overall, I'm definitely faster with LLMs. I don't know if I'm that much faster. I was probably most fluent building web apps in Django, and I was pretty dang fast with that. LLMs are more about things like "How do you build tests to prevent function drift" and "How can I scaffold a feedback loop so that the LLM can debug itself".

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

#443

Post by atmavatar »

ramraj07 wrote: post #79
eranation wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's such a drastic different experience than mine. May I ask what toolset are you using? Are you limited to using your home grown "AcmeCode" or have full access to Claude Code / Cursor with the latest and greatest models, 1M context size, full repo access? I see it generating between 50% to 90% accuracy in both small and large tasks, as in the PRs it generates range between being 50% usable code that a human…

I used to think that the people who keep saying (in March 2026) that AI does not generate good code are just not smart and ask stupid prompts. I think I've amended that thought. They are not necessarily lacking in intelligence. I hypothesize that LLMs pick up on optimism and pessimism among other sentiments in the incoming prompt: someone prompting with no hope that the result will be useful end up with useless garba…

That sounds a lot more like confirmation bias than any real effect on the AI's output.

Gung-ho AI advocates overlook problems and seem to focus more on the potential they see for the future, giving everything a nice rose tint.

Pessimists will focus on the problems they encounter and likely not put in as much effort to get the results they want, so they likely see worse results than they might have otherwise achieved and worse than what the optimist saw.

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

#444

Post by xantronix »

boredemployee wrote: post #206
fastasucan wrote: post #117

It makes my work suck, sadly. Team dynamics also contributes to that, admittedly. Last year I was working on implementing a pretty big feature in our codebase, it required a lot of focus to get the business logic right and at the same time you had be very creative to make this feasible to run without hogging to much resources. When I was nearly done and worked on catching bugs, team members grew tired of waiting and…

I completely understand. We're in a phase where founders are obsessed with productivity so everything seens to work just fine and as intended with few slops. They're racing to be as productive as possible so we can get who knows where. There are times when I honestly don't even know why we're automating certain tasks anymore. In the past, we had the option of saying we didn't know something, especially when it was an…

This feels similar to the slow encroachment of devops onto everything. We're making so much shit nowadays that there is nobody left but developers to shepherd things into production, with all the extra responsibility and none of the extra pay commensurate with being a sysadmin too.

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

#445

Post by bdangubic »

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…

100k DAU - you’ll lose 98% within 6-9 months once 1-2 person team clones it as sells it for 10% of what you are charging

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

#447

Post by erklik »

jgilias wrote: post #257
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…

I saw somewhere that you guys had All Hands where juniors were prohibited from pushing AI-assisted code due to some reliability thing going on? Was that just a hoax?

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-outage-...

About All Hands :

> Much of the coverage of the service incidents has focused on a weekly Amazon Stores operations meeting and a planned discussion of recent outages. Reviewing operational incidents is a routine part of these meetings, during which teams discuss root causes with the goal of continuing to improve reliability for customers.

This is something that's a part of every FAANG afaik. I know for a fact that there's no prohibition on pushing AI-assisted code. How would that even technically work? It'd basically mean banning Kiro/CC from the company.

> Only one of the incidents involved AI-assisted tooling, which related to an engineer following inaccurate advice that an AI tool inferred from an outdated internal wiki, and none involved AI-written code.

and this doesn't seem as "AI caused outage" as it was portrayed.

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

#449

Post by bentt »

I run a small game studio. I use Cursor to write features that I don’t want to hand code, but wouldn’t ask a teammate to do. Usually that is because describing the idea to a person would take about as much effort and the result would take longer.

These are usually internal tools, workflow improvements, and one off features. Anything really central to the game’s code gets human coded.

I think the further you are from the idea part, the less fun AI coding will be for you. Because now you need to not just translate some spec to code, you have to translate it to a prompt, which ups the chances of playing the telephone game. At least when you write the code yourself you are getting real with it and facing all the ambiguities as a matter of course. If you just pass it to an LLM you never personally encounter the conflicts, and it might make assumptions you would not… but you don’t even realize it because they are assumptions!

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

#450

Post by wasabinator »

brunooliv wrote: post #441

Couldn’t read the entire comments but, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive so far. I think what helps me be effective is a combination of factors: I work only in a modern, well-documented and well-architected Java codebase with over 80% test coverage. I only use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 on High Effort. I always, ALWAYS treat my “new job” as writing a detailed ticket for whatever it is I need to do. I give…

I find this pretty interesting. I am curious though: Did you dislike coding? You sound genuinely excited to not be doing it anymore.

For me I have been a coder since a very young age and I am nearing the end of my career now. I still love writing code to problem solve just as much as the first day I learnt to code. The thought of something taking that task away from me doesn't fill me with glee.

A parallel for me is if I enjoyed puzzle pages and those brought me with joy and satisfaction employing my grey matter to solve, I just wouldn't find it interesting to have an agent complete the forms to me, with me simply guiding the agent to clues.

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