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Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#81

Post by zero_shift »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #51
zero_shift wrote: post #40

I actually kind of do the opposite to most developers. Instead of having it write the code, I try to use it like a pair reviewer, critiquing as I go. I ask it questions like "is it safe to pass null here", "can this function panic?", etc. Or I'll ask it for opinions when I second guess my design choices. Sometimes I just want an authoritative answer to tell me my instincts are right. So it becomes more like an extra…

Idk what models you are using. I'm pretty sure I tried the best avialable and arguing with them about pointers in non trivial cases seems like a recipe for disaster. > Sometimes I just want an authoritative answer to tell me my instincts are right. You realize that LLM answers highly depend on how you frame your question?

> You realize that LLM answers highly depend on how you frame your question?

Of course I do. I'm not a moron.

In these cases, I already know the most likely answer to my question. The LLM just helps me reduce my self doubt

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#82

Post by senko »

simonw wrote: post #11

One 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…

> The dev dependency group is a special case for uv run - it will always install those dependencies as well

Huh, this is...unexpected. TIL, indeed!

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#83

Post by bird0861 »

coffee_am wrote: post #78

On the other side of the equation I've been spending much more time on code-review on an open source project I maintain, because developers are much more productive and I still code-review at the same speed. The real issue is that I can't trust the AI generated code, or trust the AI to code-review for me. Some repeated issues I see: - In my experience the AI doesn't integrate well with the code that there is already…

With respect to the first issue you raise, I would perhaps start including prompts in comments. This is a little sneaky sure. And maybe explicitly putting them in a markdown would be better. But there's the risk that markdown won't be loaded. Perhaps it might be possible to inject the file into context via a comment, I've never tried that though and I doubt every assistant will act in a consistent way. The comment method is probably the best bet IMO.

Forgive me because this is a bit of a tangential rant on the second issue, but Gemini Pro 3 was absolutely heinous about this so I cancelled my sub. I'm completely puzzled what it's supposed to be good for.

To your third issue, you should maybe consider building a dataset from those interactions... you might be able to train a LoRA on them and use it as a first pass before you lift a finger to scroll through a PR.

I think a really big issue is that there is a lack of consistency in the use of AI for SWE. There are a lot of models and poorly designed agents/assistants with really unforgivable performance and people just blindly using them without caring about the outputs amounts to something that is kind of Denial-of-Service-y and I keep seeing this issue be raised over and over again.

At the risk of sounding elitist, the world might be a better place for project maintainers when the free money stops rolling into the frontier labs to offer anyone and everyone free use of the models...never give a baby powertools and so on.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

coffee_am wrote: post #78

On the other side of the equation I've been spending much more time on code-review on an open source project I maintain, because developers are much more productive and I still code-review at the same speed. The real issue is that I can't trust the AI generated code, or trust the AI to code-review for me. Some repeated issues I see: - In my experience the AI doesn't integrate well with the code that there is already…

That basically matches, in broad outline, what I see from AI use in an enterprise environment; absent a radical change, I think the near term impact of AI on software development is going to be too increase velocity while shifting workload to less (but not zero) code writing and more code reviewing and knowing when you need to prompt-and-review vs. hand-code.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#85

Post by d13z »

lucid-dev wrote: post #75
anditherobot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair challenge to the idea. But what i am saying is that every line of boilerplate, every import statement, every configuration file consumes precious tokens. The more code, the more surface area the LLM needs to cover before understanding or implementing correctly. Right now the solution to expensive token limits is the most token-efficient technology. let's reframe it better. Was react made to help humans organize…

But why are you considering tokens so precious? At current prices you can pretty much get away with murder even for the most expensive models out there. You know, $14/million output tokens. 10k output tokens is 14 cents. Which is ~40k words, or whatever. The way to use LLM's for development is to use the API.

I'm not so worried about the money but more about context rot. I used spec driven development for a week and I had constant compacting with Claude code. I burned 200€ in one week and now I'm trying something different: only show diffs and try to always talk to me in interfaces. I do think that at some point there will be frameworks or languages optimised for LLMs.

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#86

Post by topologie »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #25

The 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…

English is not my first language, what do you mean by Codification?

Re: Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?

#87

Post by cadamsdotcom »

topologie wrote: post #86
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #25

The 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…

English is not my first language, what do you mean by Codification?

Look up the word codify to get an idea.

You can think of it literally as turning prompts that are non-deterministic into code. But it is also the idea of documenting all the things you learned while doing something. It’s what companies do when they invent process for humans (eg. “expense reports must be approved by your manager and finance before you get reimbursed”)

AI is a great to for exploring and experimenting with ways to do things- but once you know how you want it done, AI is just a liability because it might randomly decide to do things some other way, and it might do the thing differently tomorrow even though that’s not what you want.

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