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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?

#471

Post by dboon »

achierius wrote: post #337
dboon wrote: post #124

AI programming, for me, is just a few simple rules: 1. True vibe coding (one-shot, non-trivial, push to master) does not work. Do not try it. 2. Break your task into verifiable chunks. Work with Claude to this end. 3. Put the entire plan into a Markdown file; it should be as concise as possible. You need a summary of the task; individual problems to solve; references to files and symbols in the source code; a work li…

How do you mean 'a tmux session' to be something verifiable?

You can ask it to spin up a session to e.g. run gdb interactively

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

#472

Post by mattmanser »

Marsymars wrote: post #74
bogtog wrote: post #10

Using voice transcription is nice for fully expressing what you want, so the model doesn't need to make guesses. I'm often voicing 500-word prompts. If you talk in a winding way that looks awkward when in text, that's fine. The model will almost certainly be able to tell what you mean. Using voice-to-text is my biggest suggestion for people who want to use AI for programming (I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can…

> I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can go 70-90 WPM on a typing test. However, this speed drops quickly when I need to also think about what I'm saying. Typing that fast is also kinda tiring, whereas talking/thinking at 100-120 WPM feels comfortable. This doesn't feel relatable at all to me. If my writing speed is bottlenecked by thinking about what I'm writing, and my talking speed is significantly faster, that…

It's kind of the point. If you start writing it, you'll start correcting it and moving things around and adding context and fiddling and more and more.

And your 5 minute prompt just turned I to 1/2 hour of typing

With voice you get on with it, and then start iterating, getting Claude to plan with you.

Not been impressed with agentic coding myself so far, but I did notice that using voice works a lot better imo, keeping me focused on getting on with letting the agent do the work.

I've also found it good for stopping me doing the same thing in slack messages. I ramble my general essay to ChatGPT/Claude, get them to summarize rewrite a few lines in my own voice. Stops me spending an hour crafting a slack message and tends to soften it.

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

#473

Post by mattmanser »

listic wrote: post #14
bogtog wrote: post #10

Using voice transcription is nice for fully expressing what you want, so the model doesn't need to make guesses. I'm often voicing 500-word prompts. If you talk in a winding way that looks awkward when in text, that's fine. The model will almost certainly be able to tell what you mean. Using voice-to-text is my biggest suggestion for people who want to use AI for programming (I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can…

Thanks for the advice! Could you please share how did you enable voice transcription for your setup and what it actually is?

Aquavoice, YC company, really good. Got it after doing a bit of research on here, there's something for Mac that's supposed to be good too.

If you want local transcription, locally running models aren't quite good enough yet.

They use right-ctrl as their trigger. I've set mine to double tap and then I can talk with long pauses/thinking and it just keeps listening till I tap to finish.

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

#474

Post by mattmanser »

Bombthecat wrote: post #427
majewsky wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't most of that caused by that one change in 2022 to how R&D expenses are depreciated, thus making R&D expenses (like retaining dev staff) less financially attractive? Context: This news story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

Yes! Even though it's only a tax rule for USA, it somehow applied for the whole world! Thats how mighty the US is! Or could it be, after the growth and build, we are in maintenance mode and we need less people? Just food for thought

Yes, because US big tech have regional offices in loads of other countries too, fired loads of those developers at the same time and so the US job market collapse affected everyone.

And since then there's been a constant doom and gloom narrative even before AI started.

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

#475

Post by Krish-mal15 »

My suggestion is to use prompting tools. Its usually the prompts fault. AI reasoning does exist, but it performs at its best if you spoonfeed actionable steps and provide as much context as possible.

I personally use JSON prompts that follow this format I shared on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1pl4zbr/i_made_...

I actually built a tool for this called Promptify (https://joinpromptify.com/) which is a completely free chrome extension that works with really any AI platform

Use claude code + this extension and you'll be set! Completely free stack unless you buy Claude pro

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

#476

Post by hbrn »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #469
hbrn wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What a weird blast furnace! Would anyone try to use this tool in such a scenario? Not most experienced metalworkers. Absolutely wrong. If this blast furnace would cost a fraction of other blast furnaces, and would allow you to produce certain metals that were too expensive to produce previously (even with high error rate), almost everyone would use it. Which is exactly what we're seeing right now. Yes, you have to…

> this blast furnace would cost a fraction of other blast furnaces Totally incorrect: as we already mentioned, this blast furnace actually costs just as much as every other blast furnace to run all the time (which they do). The difference is only in the outputs, which I described in my post and now repeat below, with emphasis this time. Let's also imagine that the blast furnace changes behavior minute-to-minute (usua…

The furnaces I'm comparing are Claude Code vs hiring more engineers. Not Claude Code vs Codex vs Gemini. If $20/mo makes an engineer even 10% more productive, purchasing Claude Code is a no-brainer.

Most engineers feel like Claude Code is a multiplier for their productivity, despite all the flaws that it has. You're arguing that CC is unusable and is a net negative on the productivity, but this is the opposite of what people are feeling. I am able to tackle problems I wouldn't even attempt previously (sometimes to my detriment).

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

#477

Post by theshrike79 »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #330
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…

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.

You know what else is nondeterministic? "Project Management"

You tell humans to make code, they make code.

How do you check it's correct and does what it should?

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

#478

Post by theshrike79 »

eucyclos wrote: post #319
Marsymars wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can go 70-90 WPM on a typing test. However, this speed drops quickly when I need to also think about what I'm saying. Typing that fast is also kinda tiring, whereas talking/thinking at 100-120 WPM feels comfortable. This doesn't feel relatable at all to me. If my writing speed is bottlenecked by thinking about what I'm writing, and my talking speed is significantly faster, that…

It's often better to segregate creative and inhibitive systems even if you need the inhibitive systems to produce a finished work. There's a (probably apocryphal) conversation between George RR Martin and Stephen King that goes something like: GRRM: How do you write so many books?... Don't you ever spend hours staring at the page, agonizing over which of two words to use, and asking 'am I actually any good at this?'…

It's not fully apocryphal, there's video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7XMkjDGw0 - not those exact words, but the gist of it is there.

(Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_PBqSPNTfg )

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

#479

Post by theshrike79 »

buu700 wrote: post #213
Marsymars wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can go 70-90 WPM on a typing test. However, this speed drops quickly when I need to also think about what I'm saying. Typing that fast is also kinda tiring, whereas talking/thinking at 100-120 WPM feels comfortable. This doesn't feel relatable at all to me. If my writing speed is bottlenecked by thinking about what I'm writing, and my talking speed is significantly faster, that…

I prefer writing myself, but I could see the appeal of producing a first draft of a prompt by dumping a verbal stream of consciousness into ChatGPT. That might actually be kind of fun to try while going on a walk or something.

You can feed all that into Claude and have a prototype ready while you get home.

The Claude App version works from your phone and has a virtual environment it can use to write code and push it to a github repo :)

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

#480

Post by theshrike79 »

mergesort wrote: post #424

I spend a lot of time teaching people AI by having them bring their own idea that we build it over a three-hour workshop. [1] The workshop starts off with a very simple premise. I ask people to write their idea down in a Google Doc with all the details they need to hand it off to an AI, so the AI can build it autonomously. What people discover is that communicating your idea is MUCH harder than they thought. They oft…

This is the key. Working with AI is exactly like project management.

You have a problem and you need to describe it in a way that Other People can solve it in a way that satisfies what you want and need.

"Build me a spaced repetition web app using FSRS" will give you _something_, the statistical average to be exact, but most likely it's not what you meant or wanted.

You need to make the implicit things in your head explicit and write them down. AND then you need to split that into manageable chunks of work that build on top of each other.

It's a skill.

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