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

I just moved to a new team in my company that prides itself on being "AI-First". The work is a relatively new project that was stood up by a small team of two developers (both of whom seem pretty smart) in the last 4 months. Both acknowledged that some parts of their tech stack, they just don't at all understand (next.js frontend). The backend is a gigantic monorepo of services glued together.

The manager & a senior dev on my first day told me to "Don't try to write code yourself, you should be using AI". I got encouraged to use spec-driven development and frameworks like superpowers, gsd, etc.

I'm definitely moving faster using AI in this way, but I legitimately have no idea what the fuck I am doing. I'm making PRs I don't know shit about, I don't understand how it works because there is an emphasis on speed, so instead of ramping up in a languages / technologies I've never used, I'm just shipping a ton of code I didn't write and have no real way to vet like someone who has been working with it regularly and actually has mastered it.

This time last year, I was still using AI, but using it as a pair programming utility, where I got help learn to things I don't know, probe topics / concepts I need exposure to, and reason through problems that arose.

I can't control the direction of how these tools are going to evolve & be used, but I would love if someone could explain to me how I can continue to grow if this actually is the future of development. Because while I am faster, the hope seems to be AI / Agents / LLMs will only ever get better and I will never need to have an original thought or use crtical thinking.

I have just about 4 years of professional experience. I had about 10 - 12 months of the start of my career where I used google to learn things before LLMs became sole singular focus.

I wake up every day with existential dread of what the future looks like.

A new way of operating is forced down your throat due to expectations of how the technology will evolve. What actually happens is highly variable - on the spectrum between a huge positive and negative surprise.

The people forcing it down you do not care about the long-term ramifications.

" this team is incredibly cooked in the long term" they're not actually.

People like you are making sunk expenditures whilst the models are evolving... they can just wait until the models get to 'steady-state' to figure out the optimal workflow. They will have lost out on far less.

Like a lot of things, it’s neither and somewhere in the middle. It’s net useful even if just for code reviews that make you think about something you may have missed. I personally also use it to assist in feature development, but it’s not allowed to write or change anything unless I approve it (and I like to look at the diff for everything)

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 people talking about how they're now 10x more productive, and everyone needs to do x y an z now. I just don't know any of these people.

Non-professionally, it's amazing how well it does on a small greenfield task, and I have seen that 10x improvement in velocity. But, at work, close to 0 so far.

Of the posts I've seen at work, they typically tend to be teams doing something new / greenfield-ish or a refactor. So I'm not surprised by their results.