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

> A smarter model would be great but there are bigger productivity gains to be had with a good set up, a faster model, and abstracting away the need to think about agents or context usage. I’m still figuring out a good set up. Something with the speed of Haiku with the reasoning of Opus without the overhead of having to think about the management of agents or context would be sweet.

I was thinking about this recently. This kind of setup is a Holy Grail everyone is searching for. Make the damn tool produce the right output more of the time. And yet, despite testing the methods provided by the people who claim they get excellent results, I still come to the point where the it gets off rails. Nevertheless, since practically everybody works on resolving this particular issue, and huge amounts of money have been poured into getting it right, I hope in the next year or so we will finally have something we can reliably use.

It’s going very well.

Experience level: very senior, programming for 25 years, have managed platform teams at Heroku and Segment.

Project type: new startup started Jan ‘26 at https://housecat.com. Pitch is “dev tools for non developers”

Team size: currently 2.

Stack: Go, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, Postgres, SQLite, GCP and exe.dev.

Claude code and other coding harnesses fully replaced typing code in an IDE over the past year for me.

I’ve tried so many tools. Cursor, Claude and Codex, open source coding agents, Conductor, building my own CLIs and online dev environments. Tool churn is a challenge but it pays dividends to keep trying things as there have been major step functions in productivity and multi tasking. I value the HN community for helping me discover and cut through the space.

Multiple VMs available over with SSH with an LLM pre-configured has been the latest level up.

Coding is still hard work designing tests, steering agents, reviewing code, and splitting up PRs. I still use every bit of my experience every day and feel tired at end of day.

My non-programmer co-founder, more of a product manager and biz ops person, has challenges all the time. He generally can only write functional prototypes. We solve this by embracing the functional prototype and doing a lot of pair programming. It is much more productive than design docs or Figma wireframes.

In general the game changer is how much a couple of people can get done. We’re able to prototype ideas, build the real app, manage SOC2 infra, marketing and go to market better than ever thanks to the “willing interns” we have. I’ve done all this before and the AI helps with so much of the boilerplate and busywork.

I’m looking for beta testers and security researchers for the product, as well as a full time engineer if anyone is interested in seeing what a “greenfield” product, engineering culture and business looks like in 2026. Contact info in my profile.

>>>> Software engineering is a mostly solved problem at this point...

I'll believe it when AI can tell me when a project will be done. I've asked my developer friends about this and I get a blank stare, like I'm stupid for asking.

> - a side project to do rough cuts of family travel videos (https://usefirstcut.com, soft launch video: https://x.com/xitijpatel/status/2026025051573686429)

I can't comment about the quality of the code you delivered for your client so I checked your side project. Unfortunately it looks like there is only a landing page (very nice!) but the way from a vibe-coded project to production is usually quite long.

I don't use it.

I know my mind fairly well, and I know my style of laziness will result in atrophying skills. Better not to risk it.

One of my co-workers already admitted as much to me around six months ago, and that he was trying not to use AI for any code generation anymore, but it was really difficult to stop because it was so easy to reach for. Sounded kind of like a drug addiction to me. And I had the impression he only felt comfortable admitting it to me because I don't make it a secret that I don't use it.

Another co-worker did stop using it to generate code because (if I'm remembering right) he can tell what it generates is messy for long-term maintenance, even if it does work and even though he's new to React. He still uses it often for asking questions.

A third (this one a junior) seemed to get dumber over the past year, opening merge request that didn't solve the problem. In a couple of these cases my manager mentioned either seeing him use AI while they were pairing (and it looked good enough so the problems just slipped by) or saw hints in the merge request with how AI names or structures the code.