Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what is worth, I prefer the name pomato to totato.
I'll keep that in mind when marketing. I was going to go with French Fry Tree.
Name to consider: twoatos (pot- and tom-)
Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
571–580 of 657 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was always a possiblty even before AI, what's hard to clone is how they got those users
possibility yes - reality often no due to cost that would have to be incurred to make this happen. the "how they got those users" is the easy part if you offering is same(ish) at a fraction of the cost.
not if LTV is already only a little higher than CAC and all the marketing channels are already saturated
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually think there’s almost an acceptable workflow here of using LLMs as part of the medium of communication. I’m pretty much fine with someone sending me 500 lines of slop with the stated expectation that I’ll dump it into an LLM on my end and interact with it. It’s the asymmetric expectations—that one person can spew slop but the other must go full-effort—that for me personally feels disrespectful.
If you write 3 bullet points and produce 500-pages of slop why would my AI summarise it back to the original 3 bullet points and not something else entirely?
It won't, and that's the joke. They will write three bullet points, but their AI will only focus on the first two and hallucinate two more to fill out the document. Your AI will ignore them completely and go off on some unrelated tangent based on the of the earlier hallucinations. Anthropic collects a fee from both of you and is the only real winner here.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't use JetBrains products at work. I also unfortunately do most of my coding at work in Python, which I think can confound things since not everything is typed
... you can't use JetBrains? What logic created a scenario where you can't use arguably the best range of cross platform IDEs, but you can somehow use spicy autocomplete to imitate some of their functionality, poorly?
I work in an extremely security minded industry. There are strict guidelines about what we can and can't use. JetBrains isn't excluded for technical reasons, but geopolitical ones.
The AI models we use are all internally hosted, and any software we use has to go through an extensive security review.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#575Earlier 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…
Hi thanks for this brilliant feature. It will really improve the product. However it needs a little bit more work before we can merge it into our main product. 1) The new feature does not follow the existing API guidelines found here: see examples an and b. 2) The new feature does not use our existing input validation and security checking code, see example. Once the following points have been addressed we will be ha…
..so they copy/paste your message into Claude and send you back a +2000, -1500 version 3 minutes later. And now you get to go hunting for issues again.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody produces bugs, but Claude is good a producing code that looks like it solves the problem but doesn't. Developers worth working with, grow out of this in a new project. Claude doesn't. An example I have of this is when I asked Claude to copy a some functionality from a front-end application to a back-end application. It got all of the function signatures right but then hallucinated the contents of the functi…
> Developers worth working with, grow out of this in a new project. Claude doesn't. There is no way this is true. People make fewer bugs with time and guidance, but no human makes zero bugs. Also, bugs are not planned; it's always easy to in hindsight say "A human would have literally copied the original lookup map," but every bug has some sort of mistake that is made that is off the status quo. That's why it's a bug…
Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer. They don't grow completely out of making bugs (although they do tend to make fewer over time), they grow out of making solutions that look right but don't actually solve the problem. This is because they understand the problem space better over time.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found in my (admittedly limited) use of LLMs that they're great for writing code if I don't forsee a need to review it myself either, but if I'm going to be editing the code myself later I need to be the one writing it. Also LLMs are bad at design.
what code do you write that you don't need to mantain/read again later?
Definitely a lot of one-shot scripts for a given environment... I've started using a run/ directory for shell scripts that will do things like spin up a set of containers defined in a compose file.. build and test certain sub-projects, initialize a database, etc.
For the most part, many of them work the first time and just continue to do so to aid a project. I've done similar in terms of scaffolding a test/demo environment around a component that I'm directly focused on... sometimes similar for documentation site(s) for gh pages, etc.
Soem things have gone surprisingly well.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#578I've had quite a bit of luck with using AI-assisted tooling for some specific workflows, and very little luck with others. To the extent that there's a trend[^1], it seems to be that tasks where I would spend a lot of time to produce a very small amount of output which is easy to evaluate objectively[^2] are sped up considerably, tasks where I would produce a large amount of output quickly (e.g. boilerplate) are sped up slightly, and most other tasks are unaffected or even slowed down (if I try to use AI tooling for them and decide it's not good enough yet).
As always, my views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
[^1]: There's less of a trend than I'd expect. There are some quite difficult-to-me tasks that AI nails (e.g. type system puzzles) and some trivial-to-me tasks that AI struggles with (e.g. "draw correct conclusions when an image is uploaded of an ever-so-slightly nonstandard data visualization like a stacked bar chart").
[^2]: My favorite example of this is creating a failing test with a local reproduction of a reported bug on production - sure I _could_ write this myself, but usually these tests are a little bit finicky to write, but once written are either obviously testing the right thing or obviously testing the wrong thing, and the code quality doesn't really matter, so there's not much benefit in having human-written code while there's a substantial benefit in having any tests like this vs not having them.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#579I found it’s great for:
1. Exploring new code bases or understanding PRs.
2. Prototyping new ideas.
3. Second opinion on problems and troubleshooting.
4. Rubber ducking.
5. Parallelize rote/boiler plate, while my deep focus is elsewhere.
6. First draft of documentation and reviews.
What I don’t understand is how some people can parallelize 5-10 engineering changes at once, and expect to support and maintain that code in the future.
The difficulty has always been in support and maintenance, not building something new, and that requires a deeper understanding.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congratulations, honestly, but I would not do that for a job. Metaphorically speaking, you’re out there sprinting on the road while people who’ve made agentic coding work for them are sipping coffee in a limo. People who haven’t made agentic coding work (but do it anyway) are sipping coffee in the back of a limo that has no brakes. No thanks to that.
You have a 200K LOC repository and you haven’t written 99.5% of it?
It was generated for me in accordance with the architecture and constraints I defined for the agent; and I’ve reviewed every line.
TDD really is that good.