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

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611–620 of 657 posts

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

#611

It has made my job an awful slog, and my personal projects move faster. At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the main project. It also included a…

All that cleanup can be done with AI and then you can add guidance to the codebase so that the next LLM will do a better job at conforming.

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

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And then we all go on trades and uhhh no one will be able pay for it lol

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

#613
post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is in denial, which is understandable AI is already better at understanding code than 99.99% of human, the more I use it the more I believe this is true. It can draw connections between dots far quicker and accurate than a human could ever be. At very least, AI is going to be a must even as a co-supervisor to your project What in doubt right now, is whether AI can manage a codebase fully autonomously without bring…

The RAG models are very competent at programming. I am worried about my job as a SWE in the near future, but didn't the MIT paper about a week ago pretty much confirm that width-scaling the model is about to (or has already) stopped giving any measurable increase in quality because the training data no longer overfills the model? Any authentic training data from pre-LLM's is assumed to have been used in training alre…

Different architectures, different RL training loops, maybe memory modules [1][2] as part of the architecture, focusing on efficiency, the giant troves of data we're generating by using claude code/gemini-cli/opencode, there's lots of research to be made.

[1] https://research.google/blog/titans-miras-helping-ai-have-lo... [2] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/Engram

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

#614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been tasked with code reviews of Claude chat bot written code (not Claude code that has RAG and can browse the file system). It always lacks any understanding of our problem area, 75% of the time it only works for a specific scenario (the prompted case), and almost 100% of the time, when I comment about this, I'm told to take it over and make it work... and to use Claude. I've kind of decided this is my last job…

You got any land down there? I would like to be close to you and, post retirement, eat said french fries daily.

This might be a little dark, but the majority of our street is very elder, and none of there families want to move over here.

They were the original non-familial homesteaders from 50+ years ago when all this land was my wife's great grandfather's, and he sold off small plots to people. He, infact, inherited it from his father, who bought a half mile square back in the 20s or 30s (I believe). The first house on the road was his (Great Great Grandpa). The road WAS his driveway, then slowly but surely new generations of the family started building houses a few hundred yards away from each other, then they started selling plots to people in the 60s, and sold the last of the original land in 2023 about a year before grandpa passed.

Now the only land left in "the family", is this 1.25 acre plot that I live on. I don't really have the desire to buy more from the folks that are dying, but my neighbor has already bought up about half of the vacant land.

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

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

Quit your palantir job, spook.

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

#616
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been tasked with code reviews of Claude chat bot written code (not Claude code that has RAG and can browse the file system). It always lacks any understanding of our problem area, 75% of the time it only works for a specific scenario (the prompted case), and almost 100% of the time, when I comment about this, I'm told to take it over and make it work... and to use Claude. I've kind of decided this is my last job…

>so you can make fries and ketchup from the same plant! We should be friends. I like your ideas.

I'm always looking for people to share my weird ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with software or computers. Unfortunately my only friends are all software people who have no interest outside of computers. Something I've found to have very little interest in anymore.

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

#617
post #104

For my job which is mostly YAML engineering with some light Go coding (Platform) I'm finding it useful. We're DRY-ing out a bunch of YAML with CUE at the moment and it's sped up that work up tremendously. When it comes to personal projects I'm feeling extremely unmotivated. Things feel more in reach and I've probably built ten times the number of throwaway projects in the past year than I have in previous years. Yet…

What in the world is YAML engineering?

DevOps? K8s config nightmare?

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

#619
It works well for me. I wouldn't have said that about 3 or 4 months ago but now it does work. How well it works seems to be highly project-dependant, my friends have much more trouble to get usable things out of LLMs.

The projects I work on are relatively small, two frontend with about 30k loc and a middleware with about 50k loc. All project were started with no llms and were pretty clean.

I use Augment and Intent with Opus 4.6

The main challenge is to avoid over engineering. It's honestly pretty hard to rein it in and get simple code, most of the time I let it do its thing and then tell it to remove some section, simplify that etc.

So I still have to tell it how to do stuff, and not just what to do.

But overall it has surpassed what I thought it would be able to do, like calling external services by itself to get the shape of the data for example.

Another win was making a mermaid chart of the whole arborescence of the projects, with special annotations on a specific type of components. Something that would be highly repetitive and a bit frustrating was done quickly with a very short prompt.

Code refactoring is also much easier for some tasks, like separating a service into multiple services depending on a certain criteria, usually by domain. When it's easy to describe but the work requires a lot of edits, LLMs usually do better than I would do manually.

team size is 2, and I have been a frontend developer for about 12 years.

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