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?

#541

Post by originalvichy » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 11:57 AM UTC

Most of the things I've used LLMs for is scripting code for integrations between systems, or scripts that extract and transform data from APIs.

For this specific use case, LLMs and their integrations with tools like VSCode have been excellent. A simple instruction file dictating what libraries to use, and lines about where to look for up-to-date API docs, increases the chances of one-shots significantly.

My favorite part has been that I'm able to use libraries I wouldn't have used previously like openpyxl. A use case like "get data from an API, transform it, and output it to an excel file with these columns" is super fast, and outputs data to a stakeholder/non-techy format.

It made me chuckle when Claude etc. release Excel integrations, since working with Excel files seems to have been at a great stage for people who've already worked with Excel/CSV libraries.

The number 1 suggestion I'd have for people eager to work with text is to use models to learn about old unix tools like grep/sed etc. With these powerful tools + modern tools + code you can build quite complex integration code for many uses. Don't sleep on the classic unix cli commands and download stuff from github to achieve things that have already been solved 40 years ago :)

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

#542

Post by nickd2001 » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:08 PM UTC

Am using Claude to attempt to do refactoring and find bugs. Sometimes its fantastic, finding issues instantly that'd take a lot of trawling or insider knowledge otherwise. Other times it gets obsessed about irrelevant things, makes suggestions that for some other obscure but non obvious reason don't work in practice. The generated code sometimes has excellent ideas I wouldn't have thought of. Other times it has places for bugs to lurk e:g if a directory isn't there, make it. Er, no thanks I want you to blow up if the dir isn't there because if it isn't , something else major went wrong. The trick is knowing when its going to be good and when hopeless and take you down a rabbit hole. Perhaps that is a meta skill on the part of the human developer. But I'm not optimistic about things improving, its the nature of how it is. The AI doesn't know personally the previous devs on the team, their programming tastes, the discussions they had at planning etc. Its got no context.

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

#543

Post by Buldak » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:14 PM UTC

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…

I've had this experience too. In the case of vibe code, there is at least some incentive from self-preservation that prevents things from getting too out of hand, because engineers know they will be on the hook if they allow Claude to break things. But the penalties for sloppy prose are much lower, so people put out slop tickets/designs/documentation, etc. more freely.

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

#544

Post by adonovan » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:18 PM UTC

I’ve been an overt AI hater but have found very recently that, though I still hate a great many things about AI, it has become useful for coding.

In 10m Gemini correctly diagnosed and then fixed a bug in a fairly subtle body of code that I was expecting to have to spend a couple hours working on.

I spent much of the past week using Gemini to build a prototype of a clean new (green field) system involving RPCs, static analysis, and sandboxing. I give it very specific instructions, usually after rounds of critical design discussions, and it generates structurally correct code that passes essentially valid tests. Error handling is a notable weakness. I review the code by hand after each step and often make changes, and I expect to go over the over the whole thing very carefully at the end, but it has saved me many hours this week.

Perhaps more valuable than the code has been the critical design conversation, in which it mostly is fluent at the level of an experienced engineer and has been able explain, defend, and justify design choices quite coherently. This saved time I would otherwise have spent debating with coworkers. But it’s not always right and it is easily led astray (and will lead astray), so you need a clear idea in mind, a firm hand, and good judgment.

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

#545

Post by code_martial » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

adonovan wrote: post #544

I’ve been an overt AI hater but have found very recently that, though I still hate a great many things about AI, it has become useful for coding. In 10m Gemini correctly diagnosed and then fixed a bug in a fairly subtle body of code that I was expecting to have to spend a couple hours working on. I spent much of the past week using Gemini to build a prototype of a clean new (green field) system involving RPCs, static…

> This saved time I would otherwise have spent debating with coworkers. But it’s not always right and it is easily led astray (and will lead astray), so you need a clear idea in mind, a firm hand, and good judgment.

The “will lead astray” part is concerning. If you already have a clear idea in mind, you probably don’t need to have the debate with coworkers.

If you are having a debate with coworkers or AI, you would rather that they be knowledgeable enough to not lead you astray.

In cases where I don’t have a clear understanding of some area, yet I don’t have someone knowledgeable to talk to, I have found myself having to discuss the same point with multiple LLMs from multiple angles to tease out the probable right way.

In summary: obviate experts, receive correct guidance, save time —- pick any two.

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

#546

Post by gilbetron » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:39 PM UTC

diacritical wrote: post #452

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make perform…

> My org [...] is all-in on AI with the goal of having 100% of our code AI generated within the next year. > People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. So either they're right (100% AI-generated code soon) and you'll be out of a job or they'll be wrong, but by then the smart people will have been gone for a while. Do you see a third future where next year you'll still hav…

"100% AI-generated code soon" doesn't mean no humans, just that the code itself is generated by AI. Generating code is a relatively small part of software engineering. And if AI can do the whole job, then white collar work will largely be gone.

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

#547

Post by tenacious_tuna » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:50 PM UTC

LordGrey wrote: post #525

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make perform…

> ... I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it ... These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform. Claude, Codex, et al are terrible at innovation. What they are good at is regurgitating patterns they've seen before, which often mean refactoring something into a more stable/common format. You can paste compiler warnings an…

> These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform.

Very reasonable nowadays, but those were things I was doing back in 2018 as a junior engineer.

> Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.

Absolutely, and I've found tremendous value in using agents to clean up old techdebt with oneline prompts. They run off, make the changes, modify tests, then put up a PR. It's brilliant and has fully reshaped my approach... but in a lot of ways expectations on my efficiency are much worse now because leadership thinks I can rewrite our techstack to another language over a weekend. It almost doesn't matter that I can pass all this tidying off onto an LLM because I'm expected to have 3x the output that I did a year ago.

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

#548

Post by tenacious_tuna » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

whiplash451 wrote: post #158

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make perform…

Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams. You’re much better off mixing both (quality work and product features).

> Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams.

I buried the lede a bit, but my frustration has been feeling like _nobody_ on my team prioritizes quality and instead optimizes for feature velocity, which then leaves some poor sod (me) to pick up the pieces to keep everything ticking over... but then I'm not shipping features.

At the end of the day if my value system is a mismatch from my employer's that's going to be a problem for me, it just baffles me that I keep ending up in what feels like an unsustainable situation that nobody else blinks at.

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

#549

Post by hapticmonkey » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

koyote wrote: post #387

piker wrote: post #212

I am working on a sub 100KLOC Rust application and can't productively use the agentic workflows to improve that application. On the other hand, I have tried them a number of times in greenfield situations with Python and the web stack and experienced the simultaneous joy and existential dread of others. They can really stand new projects up quick. As a founder, this leaves me with what I describe as the "generation s…

If what you are doing is novel then I don't think yolo'ing it will help either. Agents don't do novel. I've even noticed this in meeting summaries produced by AI: A prioritisation meeting? AI's summary is concise, accurate, useful. A software algorithm design meeting, trying to solve a domain-specific issue? AI did not understand a word of what we discussed and the summary is completely garbled rubbish. If all you're…

I’m a UX designer not a coder, but this is so bizarre to me because shouldn’t every project be doing something novel? Otherwise why does it exist? If this industry is so full of people independently writing the same stuff that AI can replicate it…then it was a vast misallocation of resources to begin with.

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

#550

Post by multidude » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

I'm loving the experience and i also realize that this part of me, the one which could write code is obsolete. Completely. Utterly obsolete. OK, so first i need to admit that i am not the best programmer, but i've been at it for 27 years.

These past months I've been working with two agents developing two things practically in parallel. And i've experienced the fastest, most motivating development sessions i ever had. Together with these two agents i was able to build two very complex systems that use all sorts of data gathering, then ETL into a format that can be queried and maintained, and it all ends up in some awesome web UIs. I used Them not only to write code, but to do the design and architecture, discussed the front end, the business reqs.

And what i can say, is that it felt like a conversation with a crazy fast person who did everything i needed in seconds. AS a tech guy i know what i want and i know how to describe it. That helped A LOT! I know when we lost context and yes, there were stupid consequences that we had to fix. But my impression is that many of these things i see criticized here refer to the people using it, less than to the AI and its output. From my point of view, the output is what i wanted, only 250x faster than i ever expected. And for the critiques targeting the AIs, after this i am sure that they will learn to fill in all those gaps. We will not be criticizing then. By then my only possible job will be to translate somebody's business reqs for an agent to implement as i speak.