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Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
91–100 of 108 posts
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#92i tell it i pay 5 dollars for each excellent response, and i have it keep track of how much money ive paid it in each session. so ill know around 20-35 dollars itll start going off the rails depending on how its performing that day, or the dollar amount will go off the rails like $42. im not doing any building off responses, its sole operation is to perform my ask at the beginning of the session (until it forgets or gets sloppy)
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one includes complete detail at saying it’s useful and life-changing too, so that’s fair. It might turn out that what works for those for whom it works is trivial “code” not worth the ssd blocks it occupies. This is actually my current theory, cause LLMs (all of them, yes we tried all of them) are capable of what I tend to not think about as programming but as industry nonsense which should have been automated/abs…
"No one includes complete detail at saying it’s useful and life-changing too" There are at least 3 posts in this very discussion sharing details and githup repos with code written mostly by LLM.
I see a weather.com class, a parser and a react gui boilerplate boilerplate tsx folder. All three are textbook and trivial areas. We are only missing an ad hoc crud orm here.
In my opinion that is not code, it’s not a business logic. What is presented is (not to offend anyone, I look at code not people) useless github-code carcasses that it contains in abundance. Real code solves problems, this code solves nothing, it just exists. A parser, a ui, an http query - it’s a boilerplate boilerplate boilerplate. You aren’t coding at writing it. It’s “my arduino is blinking leds” level of programming.
I think that’s the difference in our perception. I won’t share my current code purely for technical reasons, but for an overview, it fuzzy-detects elements on virtual displays and plays simple games with dynamic objects on screen, behaving completely human input-wise, all based on a complex statistical schedule. It uses a stack of tech and ideas that llms fails at miserably. Llms are completely useless at anything in there, because there’s basically no boilerplate and no “prior art”. I probably could offload around 15% to an llm, but through the pain of explaining what it’s supposed to assist with.
Maybe it’s me, but I think that most of the jobs that involve trivial things like “show fields with status” or “read/write a string format” are not programming jobs, but an artefact of a stupid industry that created them out of mud-level baseline it allowed to persist. These should have been removed long ago regardless of AI. People just had way too much money (for a while) to paycheck all that nonsense.
Edit: I mean not just removed, but replaced with instruments to free these jobs from existing. AI is an utterly sarcastic answer to this problem, as it automates and creates more of that absurdity rather than less.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#94cursor and all the other ai code editors always write bad enough code that i have stopped using them completely. i like the inline completions that things like supermaven provides or github copilot or even the jetbrains full line completion models. Apart from that, I might use Claude or Chat GPT to talk about an idea, but I don't really use it much. I prefer to use my real life experience and skills. Maybe if you're…
Is it significantly better than the iOS/macOS built in dictation software?
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#95I like using LLMs for building non-critical tools that make me more productive. Things like shell scripts, Github actions, or one-off tools for visualising some problem space. The kind of thing where code quality doesn't really matter, but which will save you a ton of time in the long run
Even just using your ai assistant in your .zshrc / whatever to add useful aliases etc. is a good win.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I was able to do useful things with these tools from day one of trying. This puzzles me so much every time reading such. Either I am more stupid than average and I just think the results are more useful then I can come up with, or maybe I have a knack for…
LLMs have dramatically different results depending on the domain. Getting LLMs to help me learn typescript is a joy, getting them to help me fix distributed consensus problems in my fully bespoke codebase make them look worse than useless. Some people will find them amazing, some will find them a net negative. Although finding truly zero use for them makes it hard for me to believe that this person really tried with…
Very much this, I have > 25 years programming experience, but not with typescript and react, it’s helping me with my current project. I ignore probably 2/3 of its auto suggestions, but increasingly I now highlight some code and ask it to just do x for me, rather having to go google the right function/ css magic
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always stumped by comments like this. I'm at a point where ~70% of my code is AI-written, and the majority of the remaining is mostly because it would take too much time to provide enough context to the tool/LLM of choice for it to be able to produce the code I need. Given the right context and the right choice of model/tools, I think ~90-95% of the code I write could be generated. And this is not for doing trivi…
Not OP, but I've been trying to use Copilot to help me determine how to force Android's ConnectivityService to select the network I've created as its default. The network shows up as the default network in netd. It shows up as a network when I dumpsys connectivity, but I cannot get it to be what ConnectivityService considers default. I'm open to changing the code within AOSP as this is a research project, but even th…
It’s a niche thing you’re trying to do, and likely not seen code that does that, thus it can’t help … it can’t actually think its way around it.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#98I’m exhausted by these types of posts. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I’ve tried: different models, limiting my scope, breaking it down to small tasks, prompt “engineering”; and am still getting less than useless results. I say less than useless, because I will then additionally waste time debugging or slamming my head against the wall the…
I get tremendous value. But only when using API:s that have ’always’ been more or less stable. I agree, systems with rapidly evolving featureset are painful. Successes: Git, any bash script, misc linear algebra recipes. Random debug tools in javascript (js and plain old html is stable enough). C++. C#. Sometimes Python. Biggest value currently, I guess, is the data debug tool I wrote myself for specifically for an on…
I’m working on a nextjs project, nextjs made a bunch of breaking changes and doesn’t document things consistently or comprehensively, I have a lot of grief using LLM on this framework.
This is something framework/libs/apis should factor in for future, how can you make your project LLM friendly in order to make it dev friendly.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but I've been trying to use Copilot to help me determine how to force Android's ConnectivityService to select the network I've created as its default. The network shows up as the default network in netd. It shows up as a network when I dumpsys connectivity, but I cannot get it to be what ConnectivityService considers default. I'm open to changing the code within AOSP as this is a research project, but even th…
It’s a niche thing you’re trying to do, and likely not seen code that does that, thus it can’t help … it can’t actually think its way around it.
Has it not ingested the entire AOSP codebase? I was under the impression that OpenAI had trained GPT-* on just about everything available to the public.
It's not necessarily niche either. The codebase already does this all the time. I just can't figure out why it won't do it for me.
FWIW, at least 80% of my time in writing software for an R&D laboratory is devoted to solving problems like this.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#100Even with the perfect coding Oracle, you need to ask the right questions to get good answers. The LLM will cheerfully give you bad answers if you ask the wrong question. The implication is thet you still need to learn the problem space yourself, often via the LLM, in order to ask good questions. Junior developers will ask bad questions, get dangerous code, and love it. Good programmers will learn stuff much quicker. Asking good questions is not easy. As LLMs get better, we will need to ask better and better questions in order to write more and more complex apps. This happened when we got open source libraries via the Internet (we all used to suffer alone with our immediate coworkers in the before times).