Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally? • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by sivakon » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:00 AM UTC

Xcelerate wrote: post #381

Izkata wrote: post #149

I don't use it. I know my mind fairly well, and I know my style of laziness will result in atrophying skills. Better not to risk it. One of my co-workers already admitted as much to me around six months ago, and that he was trying not to use AI for any code generation anymore, but it was really difficult to stop because it was so easy to reach for. Sounded kind of like a drug addiction to me. And I had the impression…

I've been using ChatGPT to teach myself all sorts of interesting fields of mathematics that I've wanted to learn but never had the time previously. I use the Pro version to pull up as many actual literature references as I can. I don't use it at all to program despite that being my day job for exactly the reason you mentioned. I know I'll totally forget how to program. During a tight crunch period, I might use it as…

This is an interesting usecase, and I want to learn more about your workflow. Do you also use Lean etc. for math proofs.

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

#482

Post by sroerick » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:04 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #460

sroerick wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like your pragmatic attitude to all this. I think your prompts are 'the source' in a traditional sense, and the result of those prompts is almost like 'object code'. It would be great to have a higher level view of computer source code like the one you are sketching but then to distribute the prompt and the AI (toolchain...) to create the code with and the code itself as just one of many representations. This would…

Thanks for reading it! I didn't use an LLM, lol.

On documentation, I agree with you, and have gone done the same road. I actually built out a little chat app which acts as a wrapper around the codex app which does exactly this. Unfortunately, the UI sucks pretty bad, and I never find myself using it.

I actually asked codex if it could find the chat where I created this in my logs. It turns out, I used the web interface and asked it to make a spec. Here's the link to the chat. Sorry the way I described wasn't really what happened at all! lol. https://chatgpt.com/share/69b77eae-8314-8005-99f0-db0f7d11b7...

As it happens, I actually speak-to-texted my whole prompt. And then gippity glazed me saying "This is a very good idea". And then it wrote a very, very detailed spec. As an aside, I kind of have a conspiracy theory that they deploy "okay" and "very very good" models. And they give you the good model based on if they think it will help sway public opinion. So it wrote a pretty slick piece of software and now here I am promoting the LLM. Oof da!

I didn't really mention - spec first programming is a great thing to do with LLMs. But you can go way too far with it, also. If you let the LLM run wild with the spec it will totally lose track of your project goals. The spec it created here ended up being, I think, a very good spec.

I think "code readability" is really not a solved problem, either pre or post LLM. I'm a big fan of "Code as Data" static analysis tools. I actually think that the ideal situation is less of "here is the prompt history" and something closer to Don Knuth's Literate Programming. I don't actually want to read somebody fighting context drift for an hour. I want polished text which explains in detail both what the code does and why it is structured that way. I don't know how to make the LLMs do literate programming, but now that I think about it, I've never actually tried! Hmmm....

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

#483

Post by nzoschke » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:13 AM UTC

mrmansano wrote: post #166

nzoschke wrote: post #143

It’s going very well. Experience level: very senior, programming for 25 years, have managed platform teams at Heroku and Segment. Project type: new startup started Jan ‘26 at https://housecat.com . Pitch is “dev tools for non developers” Team size: currently 2. Stack: Go, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, Postgres, SQLite, GCP and exe.dev. Claude code and other coding harnesses fully replaced typing code in an IDE over the past y…

Interesting premise for your product. Hope you find success! From a dev perspective I feel your website pass a vibe more of a "OpenClaw you can trust" than "dev tool for non developers". Is that right? Or am I misreading the idea?

Thanks. Yes that’s a proper take.

The OpenClaw stuff is awesome but it’s too raw for a lot of professionals and small teams. We’re trying to bring more guardrails to the concept and more of a Ruby on Rails philosophy to how it works.

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

#484

Post by johnfn » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:18 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #461

johnfn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, sorry, I may have been too quick to judge, but in the past when I have shared examples of AI-generated code to skeptics, the conversation rapidly devolves into personal attacks on my ability as an engineer, etc.

I think the challenge is to not be over-exuberant nor to be overly skeptical. I see AI as just another tool in the toolbox, the fact that lots of people produce crap is no different from before: lots of people produced crappy code well before AI. But there are definitely exceptions and I think those are underexposed, we don't need 500 ways to solve toy problems we need a low number of ways to solve real ones. Some of…

FWIW, I did a full modernization and redesign of a site (~50k loc) over a week with Claude - I was able to ensure quality by (ahead of time) writing a strong e2e test suite which I also drove with AI, then ensuring Claude ran the suite every time it made changes. I got a bunch of really negative comments about it on HN (alluded to in my previous comment - everything from telling me the site looked embarrassing, didn't deserve to be on HN, saying the 600ms load time was too slow, etc, etc, etc), so I mostly withdrew from posting more about it, though I do think that the strategy of a robust e2e suite is a really good idea that can really drive AI productivity.

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

#485

Post by minhaz23 » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:19 AM UTC

Xcelerate wrote: post #381

Izkata wrote: post #149

I don't use it. I know my mind fairly well, and I know my style of laziness will result in atrophying skills. Better not to risk it. One of my co-workers already admitted as much to me around six months ago, and that he was trying not to use AI for any code generation anymore, but it was really difficult to stop because it was so easy to reach for. Sounded kind of like a drug addiction to me. And I had the impression…

I've been using ChatGPT to teach myself all sorts of interesting fields of mathematics that I've wanted to learn but never had the time previously. I use the Pro version to pull up as many actual literature references as I can. I don't use it at all to program despite that being my day job for exactly the reason you mentioned. I know I'll totally forget how to program. During a tight crunch period, I might use it as…

How do you get chatgpt to teach you well? I feel like no matter how dense and detailed i ask it to be or how much i ask it to elaborate and contextualize topics with their adjacent topics to give me a full holistic understanding, it just sucks at it and is always short of helping me truly understand and intuit the subject matter.

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

#486

Post by bysiber » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:22 AM UTC

Solo dev, working on a native macOS app in SwiftUI. AI has been most useful for the boilerplate - repetitive view layouts, FileManager calls, figuring out AppKit bridging weirdness. It basically replaced Stack Overflow for me.

Where it breaks down is state management. The suggestions look right but introduce subtle bugs in how data flows between views. I've learned to only use it for isolated, well-scoped tasks. Anything that touches multiple components, I write myself.

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

#487

Post by erklik » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:25 AM UTC

senderista wrote: post #455

erklik wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somethi…

“outdated internal wiki” has to be responsible for so many AMZN outages…

Shows how although AI is great, good ol' issues that we had in human-coding times are still persistent and problematic even during the AI-age.

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

#488

Post by namtab00 » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:29 AM UTC

David-Brug-Ai wrote: post #152

konaraddi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at aws and generally use Claude Opus 4.6 1M with Kiro (aws’s public competitor to Claude Code). My experience is positive. Kiro writes most of my code. My complaints: 1. Degraded quality over longer context window usage. I have to think about managing context and agents instead of focusing solely on the task. 2. It’s slow (when it’s “thinking”). Especially when it’s tasked with something simple (e.g., I could…

[flagged]

you're describing https://github.com/steveyegge/beads

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

#489

Post by solaire_oa » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:39 AM UTC

Small team, backend. NDAs prevent widespread LLM use, but some of our engineers, junior and senior both, feel pretty confident in using Claude for "isolated" development, like generic packages or libraries that are plausibly unrelated to our work.

It's going very poorly, where the engineers are emboldened by speed and are vacating their normal code-review responsibilities. I would also say they are shirking ethical behavior by domineering other people's time, energy, and open source projects. Moreover, these forays into generic packages are largely vanity projects, an excuse to play with LLMs.

My only solution is to increase my level of code-review, which aggravates everybody involved, including me. It is not a good solution.

I could definitely perceive hardline rules being valuable surrounding LLM use (e.g. "LLM PRs must be less that n logical statements, no exceptions", is just one example rule off the top of my head), especially if the LLM can be made to stridently follow those rules, but the idea of hashing those out sounds unproductive.

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

#490

Post by avadodin » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:48 AM UTC

spicyusername wrote: post #422

avadodin wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'l…

Well, I'm not considering using any code generation outside of helper scripts because in my case coding is a negligible part of my work. If I didn't have the LLM, I would find and modify the tool it is lifting code from using pre-LLM Google.

I know asking one of these LLMs to produce a document from my notes, resulted in me having to review this professional and plausible-looking yet subtly wrong document for more hours than it would have taken me to produce the document from scratch.