Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 657 posts

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

#81

Post by ramraj07 »

lnrd wrote: post #78

I work at a unicorn in EU. Claude Code has been rolled out to all of engineering with strict cost control policies, even with these in place we burn through tens of thousands of euro per months that I think could translate in 15/20 hires easily. Are we more productive than adding people to the headcount? That's a good question that I cannot answer. Some senior people that were in the AI pilot, have been using this fo…

Why did your company get claude code with token billing instead of getting everyone max plans ?

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

#82

Post by dude250711 »

lazystar wrote: post #3

my team is anti-AI. my code review requests are ignored, or are treated more strictly than others. it feels coordinated - i will have to push back the launch date of my project as a result. another teammate added a length check to an input field, and his request was merged near instantly, even though it had zero unit testing. this team is incredibly cooked in the long term, i just need to ensure that i survive the sh…

> another teammate added a length check to an input field, and his request was merged near instantly, even though it had zero unit testing

That sounds extremely reasonable though?

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

#83

Post by ramraj07 »

cloud8421 wrote: post #56

At $WORK, my team is relatively small ( 3000 modules) in shape for AI-assisted development with a very comprehensive set of skills, and some additional tooling. It works really well (using Claude Code and Opus 4.6 primarily). Incremental changes tend to be well done and mostly one-shotted provided I use plan mode first, and larger changes are achievable by careful planning with split phases. We have skills that map t…

This exactly matches our findings: if we start molding the repo to be "AI native" whatever that means, add the right tooling and still demand all engineers take full responsibility for their output, this system is a true multiplier.

I also have Copilot and Cursor bugbot reviews and run it on a Ralph wiggum loop with claude code. A few rounds overnight and the PR is perfect and ready for a final review before merging.

I do run 4 CC sessions in parallel though, but thats just one day a week. The rest of the week is spent figuring out the next set of features and fixes needed, operational things, meetings,feedback, etc.

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

#84

Post by frumiousirc »

CharlesW wrote: post #30
pgt wrote: post #17

I am getting disproportionately good results with the models by following a process: spec -> plan -> critique -> improve plan -> implement plan.

If I may "yes, and" this: spec → plan → critique → improve plan → implement plan → code review It may sound absurd to review an implementation with the same model you used to write it, but it works extremely well. You can optionally crank the "effort" knob (if your model has one) to "max" for the code review.

A blanket follow-up "are you sure this is the best way to do it?"

Frequently returns, "Oh, you are absolutely correct, let me redo this part better."

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

#86

Post by bitwize »

ramraj07 wrote: post #79
eranation wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's such a drastic different experience than mine. May I ask what toolset are you using? Are you limited to using your home grown "AcmeCode" or have full access to Claude Code / Cursor with the latest and greatest models, 1M context size, full repo access? I see it generating between 50% to 90% accuracy in both small and large tasks, as in the PRs it generates range between being 50% usable code that a human…

I used to think that the people who keep saying (in March 2026) that AI does not generate good code are just not smart and ask stupid prompts. I think I've amended that thought. They are not necessarily lacking in intelligence. I hypothesize that LLMs pick up on optimism and pessimism among other sentiments in the incoming prompt: someone prompting with no hope that the result will be useful end up with useless garba…

This is kinda like that thing about how psychic mediums supposedly can't medium if there's a skeptic in the room. Goes to show that AI really is a modern-day ouija board.

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

#87

Post by ugh123 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #85

I've been working on a client server unity based game the last couple of years. It's pretty bad at handling that use case. It misses tons of corner cases that span the client server divide.

When you prompt does the agent have access/visibility to all code bases/repos at once and do you prompt it to update both at the same time? That has worked well for me for client/server stuff.

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

#88

Post by theshrike79 »

hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #13

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…

Just reply with this to every AI programming task: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

It's just plain unprofessional to just YOLO shit with AI and force actual humans to read to code even if the "author" hasn't read it.

Also API design etc. should be automatically checked by tooling and CI builds, and thus PR merges, should be denied until the checks pass.

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

#89

Post by spprashant »

I only just started using it at work in the last month.

I am a data engineer maintaining a big data Spark cluster as well as a dozen Postgres instances - all self hosted.

I must confess it has made me extremely productive if we measure in terms of writing code. I don't even do a lot of special AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md shenanigans, I just prompt CC, work on a plan, and then manually review the changes as it implements it.

Needless to say this process only works well because: A) I understand my code base. B) I have a mental structure of how I want to implement it.

Hence it is easy to keep the model and me in sync about what's happening.

For other aspects of my job I occasionally run questions by GPT/Gemini as a brainstorming partner, but it seems a lot less reliable. I only use it as a sounding board. I does not seem to make me any more effective at my job than simply reading documents or browsing github issues/stack overflow myself.

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

#90

Post by wombat-man »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #10

I work at a FAANG. Professionally, I have had almost no luck with it, outside of summarizing design docs or literally just finding something in the code that a simple search might not find: such is this team's code that does X? I am yet to successfully prompt it and get a working commit. Further, I will add that I also don't know any ICs personally who have successfully used it. Though, there's endless posts of peopl…

Also at FAANG. I think I am using the tools more than my peers based on my conversations. The first few times I tried our AI tooling, it was extremely hit and miss. But right around December the tooling improved a lot, and is a lot more effective. I am able to make prototypes very quickly. They are seldom check-in ready, but I can validate assumptions and ideas. I also had a very positive experience where the LLM pointed out a key flaw in an API I had been designing, and I was able to adjust it before going further into the process.

Once the plan is set, using the agentic coder to create smaller CLs has been the best avenue for me. You don't want to generate code faster than you and your reviewers can comprehend it. It'll feel slow, but check ins actually move faster.

I will say it's not all magic and success. I have had the AI lead me down some dark corners, assuring me one design would work when actually it is a bit outdated or not quite the right fit for the system we are building for because of reasons. So, I wouldn't really say that it's a 10x multiplier or anything, but I'm definitely getting things done faster than I could on my own. Expertise on the part of the user is still crucial.

One classic issue I used to run into, is doing a small refactor and then having to manually fix a bunch of tests. It is so much simpler to ask the LLM to move X from A to B and fix any test failures. Then I circle back in a few minutes to review what was done and fix any issues.

The other thing is, it has visibility for the wider code base, including some of our infrastructure that we're dependent on. There have been a couple times in the past quarter where our build is busted by an external team, and I am able to ask the LLM given the timeframe and a description of the issue, the exact external failure that caused it. I don't really know how long it would have taken to resolve the issue otherwise, since the issues were missed by their testing. That said, I gotta wonder if those breakages were introduced by LLM use.

My job hasn't been this fun in a long, long time and I am a little uneasy about what these tools are going to mean for my personal job security, but I don't know how we can put the genie back into the bottle at this point.

Post reply on HN