For my real work? It has not been helpful so far. For side projects? It's been a 10x+ multiplier.
curious: which field are you in professionally?
Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#62The biggest principle is codification. Codify everything. For instance, this skill of web development: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vercel-labs/web-interface-... That’s too much for a model to carry in its context while it’s trying to do actual work. Far better is to give that skill.md to a model and have it produce several hundred lines of code with a shebang at the top. Now you haven’t got a skill, you’ve got…
> have it produce several hundred lines of code with a shebang at the top. Am I the only one who worries about agents creating malicious/unsafe code to execute?
My friend, let me introduce you to a very simple technique, it’s called .. reading the code.
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#63The biggest principle is codification. Codify everything. For instance, this skill of web development: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vercel-labs/web-interface-... That’s too much for a model to carry in its context while it’s trying to do actual work. Far better is to give that skill.md to a model and have it produce several hundred lines of code with a shebang at the top. Now you haven’t got a skill, you’ve got…
As one often finds with “effective LLM usage” advice, all of those things would help humans on the team as well! As would other advice like keeping the architecture docs up to date, writing down important design decisions with rationale, breaking big features down into steps, etc. Maybe one should just search for advice from the last 20 years on how to make a human development team more effective, and do that stuff.…
So depressing that this got downvoted
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#64I have used custom code generators at work for 25+ years.
The generators typically generates about 90% of the code I need to write a biz app. Leaving the most important code to me: the biz logic.
No AI. Just code that takes a (simple) declarative spec file and generates Typescript/C++/Java/... code.
I am also using AI's daily. However the code generators are still generating more productivity for me than AI's ever have.
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#65One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it. I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed. This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it…
Are you doing this for non-library projects as well? I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of packaging a microservice using this mechanism (I haven't heard of this before now).
I have templates for Datasette plugin, Python libraries and Python CLI tools.
I often have Claude Code build little HTML+JavaScript tools which are simple enough that I don't need a template ("Vanilla JavaScript, no dependencies or build script, test it with Playwright").
I've built a couple of Go apps which works great because Go has such strong default patterns and a full featured standard library, so again no need for a template.
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#66Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> have it produce several hundred lines of code with a shebang at the top. Am I the only one who worries about agents creating malicious/unsafe code to execute?
My friend, let me introduce you to a very simple technique, it’s called .. reading the code.
If all you're doing is checking for blackhatting, shouldn't you run like a Dr.Web or McAfee for code... if it existed?
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#68Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#69Just imagine when we have quantum computing. Unlimited context windows, instant answers.
What would you make if you could make anything? Does it all just lose meaning?
Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?
#70I have used custom code generators at work for 25+ years. The generators typically generates about 90% of the code I need to write a biz app. Leaving the most important code to me: the biz logic. No AI. Just code that takes a (simple) declarative spec file and generates Typescript/C++/Java/... code. I am also using AI's daily. However the code generators are still generating more productivity for me than AI's ever ha…
How come such a large portion of the code is generated?