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

> If you aren't doing this level of work by now, you will be automated soon.

It's harder and harder to detect sarcasm these days but in case you're being serious, I've tested a similar setup and I noticed Claude produces perfectly plausible code that has very subtle bugs that get harder and harder to notice. In the end, the initial speedup was gone and I decided to rewrite everything by hand. I'm working on a product where we need to understand the code base very well.

5 years ago, I set out to build an open-source, interoperable marketplace. It was very ambitious because it required me to build an open source Shopify for not only e-commerce, but restaurants, gyms, hotels, etc that this marketplace could tap into. Without AI, this vision would’ve faltered but with AI, this vision is in reach. I see so many takes about AI killing open-source but I truly think it will liberate us from proprietary SaaS and marketplaces given enough time.

Here's my anecdote: I use ChatGPT, Gemini (web chat UI) and Claude. Claude is a bit more convenient in that it has access to my code bases, but this comes at the cost of I have to be careful I'm steering it correctly, while with the chat bots, I can feed it only the correct context.

They simplify discrete tasks. Feature additions, bug fixes, augmenting functionality.

They are incapable of creating good quality (easily expandable etc) architecture or overall design, but that's OK. I write the structs, module layout etc, and let it work on one thing at a time. In the past few days, I've had it:

  - Add a ribbon/cartoon mesh creator
  - Fixed a logical vs physical pixel error on devices where they were different for positioning text, and setting window size
  - Fixed a bug with selecting things with the mouse under specific conditions
  - Fixing the BLE advertisement payload format when integrating with a service.
  - Inputting tax documents for stock sales from the PDF my broker gives me to the CSV format the tax software uses

Overall, great tool! But I think a lot of people are lying about its capabilities.

Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization.

Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it: but if you're not shipping features, if you're not driving the income needle, you have a much more difficult time framing your value to a non-engineering audience, who ultimately sign the paychecks.

Obviously this varies wildly by organization, but it's been true everywhere I've worked to varying degrees. Some companies (and bosses) are more self-aware than others, which can help for framing the conversation (and retaining one's sanity), but at the end of the day if I'm making a stand about how bad AI quality is, but my AI-using coworker has shipped six medium sized features, I'm not winning that argument.

It doesn't help that I think non-engineers view code quality as a technical boogeyman and an internal issue to their engineering divisions. Our technical leadership's attitude towards our incidents has been "just write better code," which... Well. I don't need to explain the ridiculousness of that statement in this forum, but it undermines most people's criticism of AI. Sure, it writes crap code and misses business requirements; but in the eyes of my product team? That's just dealing with engineers in general. It's not like they can tell the difference.

There’s a lot more going on there than AI …