Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

I've been working on a personal project recently, rewriting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit. The main work is translating the UI templates into idiomatic SvelteKit while maintaining the original styling. This includes things like using semantic HTML instead of div-spamming, not wrapping divs in divs in divs, and replacing bootstrap with minimal tailwind. It also includes some logic refactors, to maintain the original functionality but rewritten to avoid years of code debt. Things like replacing templates using boolean flags for multiple views with composable Svelte components.

I've had a fairly steady process for doing this: look at each route defined in Django, build out my `+page.server.ts`, and then split each major section of the page into a Svelte component with a matching Storybook story. It takes a lot of time to do this, since I have to ensure I'm not just copying the template but rather recreating it in a more idiomatic style.

This kind of work seems like a great use case for AI assisted programming, but I've failed to use it effectively. At most, I can only get Claude Code to recreate some slightly less spaghetti code in Svelte. Simple prompting just isn't able to get AI's code quality within 90% of what I'd write by hand. Ideally, AI could get it's code to something I could review manually in 15-20 minutes, which would massively speed up the time spent on this project (right now it takes me 1-2 hours to properly translate a route).

Do you guys have tips or suggestions on how to improve my efficiency and code quality with AI?

First you have to be very specific with what you mean by idiomatic code - what’s idiomatic for you is not idiomatic for an LLM. Personally I would approach it like this:

1) Thoroughly define step-by-step what you deem to be the code convention/style you want to adhere to and steps on how you (it) should approach the task. Do not reference entire files like “produce it like this file”, it’s too broad. The document should include simple small examples of “Good” and “Bad” idiomatic code as you deem it. The smaller the initial step-by-step guide and code conventions the better, context is king with LLMs and you need to give it just enough context to work with but not enough it causes confusion.

2) Feed it to Opus 4.5 in planning mode and ask it to follow up with any questions or gaps and have it produce a final implementation plan.md. Review this, tweak it, remove any fluff and get it down to bare bones.

3) Run the plan.md through a fresh Agentic session and see what the output is like. Where it’s not quite correct add those clarifications and guardrails into the original plan.md and go again with step 3.

What I absolutely would NOT do is ask for fixes or changes if it does not one-shot it after the first go. I would revise plan.md to get it into a state where it gets you 99% of the way there in the first go and just do final cleanup by hand. You will bang your head against the wall attempting to guide it like you would a junior developer (at least for something like this).

I've been heavily vibe coding for a couple of personal projects. A free kids typing game and bringing back a multiplayer game I played a lot as a kid back to life both with pretty good success.

Things I personally find work well.

1. Chat through with the AI first the feature you want to build. In codex using vscode I always switch to chat mode, talk through what I am trying to achieve and then once myself and the AI are in "agreement" switch to agent mode. Google's antigravity sort of does this by default and I think it's probably the correct paradigm to use.

2. Get the basics right first. It's easy for the AI to produce a load of slop, but using my experience of development I feel I am (sort of) able to guide the AI in advance in a similar way to how I would coach junior developers.

3. Get the AI to write tests first. BDD seems to work really well for AI. The multiplayer game I was building seemed to regress frequently with just unit tests alone, but when I threw cucumber into the mix things suddenly got a lot more stable.

4. Practice, the more I use AI the more I believe prompting is a skill in itself. It takes time to learn how to get the best out of an Agent.

What I love about AI is the time it gives me to create these things. I'd never been able to do this before and I find it very rewarding seeing my "work" being used by my kids and fellow nostalgia driven gamers.

I break everything down into very small tasks. Always ask it to plan how it will do it. Make sure to review the plan and spot mistakes. Then only ask it to do one step at a time so you can control the whole process. This workflow works well enough as long as you're not trying to do anything too interesting. Anything which is even a little bit unique it fails to do very well.

For the one disinclined to get into closed source, proprietary tools, what is the next best thing to try?

I heard of Cline and Aider, but didn't try anything.