It has reignited my passion for coding by making it so I don't have to use my coding muscle as much during the day to improve our technologically boring product.
Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
201–210 of 657 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#202> If you've recently used AI tools for professional coding work, tell us about it.
POCC (Plain Old Claude Code). Since the 4.5 models, It does 90% of the work. I do a final tinkering and polishing for the PR because by this point it is easy for me to fix the code than asking the model to fix it for me.
The work: Fairly straightward UI + backend work on a website. We have designers producing Figma and we use Figma MCP to convert that to web pages.
POCC reduces the time taken to complete the work by at least 50%. The last mile problem exist. Its not a one-shot story to PR prompt. There are a few back & forths with the model, some direct IDE edits, offline tests, etc. I can see how having subagents/skills/hooks/memory can reduce the manual effort further.
Challenges: 1) AI first documentation: Stories have to be written with greater detail and acceptance criteria. 2) Code reviews: copilot reviews on Github are surprisingly insightful, but waiting on human reviews is still a bottleneck. 3) AI first thinking: Some of the lead devs are still hung up on certain best practices that are not relevant in a world where the machine generates most of the code. There is a friction in the code LLM is good at and the standards expected from an experienced developer. This creates busy work at best, frustration at worst. 4) Anti-AI sentiment: There is a vocal minority who oppose AI for reasons from craftsmanship to capitalism to global environment crisis. It is a bit political and slack channels are getting interesting. 5) Prompt Engineering: Im in EU, when the team is multi-lingual and English is adopted as the language of communication, some members struggle more than others. 6) Losing the will to code. I can't seem to make up my mind if the tech is like the invention of calculator or the creation of social media. We don't know its long term impact on producing developers who can code for a living.
Personally, I love it. I mourn for the loss of the 10x engineer, but those 10x guys have already onboarded the LLM ship.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
"aren't you part of the problem?" Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?
Employees, especially ones as well leveraged and overpaid as software engineers, are not victims. They can leave. They _should_ leave. Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time.
Employees are not victims. Sounds like a universal principle.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a lot more going on there than AI …
Not really, this is exactly what I expect due to baseless lies from the AI companies and a disdain for employee payroll by the C-suite.
they fantasize about unpaid interns writing specs and nobody ever needed to look at the code in a few years
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have read comments about this on X, here, and other places, yet I have ever seen there be proof this is an actual productivity boost. I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it making making subtle mistakes, all the time. Are you really being more productive (let’s say 3x times more), or just feel that way because you are constantly prompting Claude? Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t buy it.
> I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it making making subtle mistakes, all the time. Didn't we make subtle mistakes without AI? Why did we spend so much time debugging and doing code reviews? > Are you really being more productive (let’s say 3x times more) At least 2x more productive, and that's huge.
I think you’ve forgotten about the context of OP’s post. He said he uninstalled vscode and uses a dashboard for managing his agents. How are you going to be able to do code review well when you don’t even know what’s going on in your own project? I catch subtle bugs Claude emits because I know exactly what’s happening because I’m actively working with Claude, not letting Claude do everything.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#206It makes my work suck, sadly. Team dynamics also contributes to that, admittedly. Last year I was working on implementing a pretty big feature in our codebase, it required a lot of focus to get the business logic right and at the same time you had be very creative to make this feasible to run without hogging to much resources. When I was nearly done and worked on catching bugs, team members grew tired of waiting and…
I completely understand.
We're in a phase where founders are obsessed with productivity so everything seens to work just fine and as intended with few slops.
They're racing to be as productive as possible so we can get who knows where.
There are times when I honestly don't even know why we're automating certain tasks anymore.
In the past, we had the option of saying we didn't know something, especially when it was an area we didn't want to know about. Today, we no longer have that option, because knowledge is just a prompt away. So you end up doing front-end work for a backend application you just built, even though your role was supposed to be completely different.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#207I've been using opencode and oh-my-opencode with Claude's models (via github Copilot). The last two or three months feel like they have been the most productive of my 28-year career. It's very good indeed with Rails code, I suspect it has something to do with the intentional expressiveness of Ruby plus perhaps some above-average content that it would be trained on for this language and framework. Or maybe that's just my bias.
It takes a bit of hand holding and multiple loops to get things right sometimes, but even with that, it's pretty damn good. I don't usually walk away from it, I actively monitor what it's doing, peek in on the sub-agents, and interject when it goes down a wrong path or writes messy code. But more often than not, it goes like this:
- Point at a GH issue or briefly describe the task
- Either ask it to come up with a plan, or just go straight to implementation
- When done, run *multiple* code review loops with several dedicated code review agents - one for idiomatic Rails code, one for maintainabilty, one for security, and others as needed
I've been using this approach on a side project, and even though it's only nights an weekends, it's probably the most robust, well-tested and polished solo project I've ever built. All those little nice-to-have and good-to-great things that normally fall by the wayside if you only have nights and weekends - all included now.
And the funny thing is - I feel coding with AI like this gets me in the zone more than hand-coding. I suspect it's the absence of all those pesky rabbit holes that tend to be thrown up by any non-trivial code base and tool chain which can easily distract us from thinking about the problem domain and instead solving problems of our tools. Claude deals with all that almost as a side effect. So while it does its thing, I read through it's self-talk while thinking along about the task at hand, intervening if I disagree, but I stay at the higher level of abstraction, more or less. Only when the task is basically done do I dive a level deeper into code organisation, maintainability, security, edge cases, etc. etc.
Needless to say that very good test coverage is essential to this approach.
Now, I'm very ambiguous about the AI bubble, I believe very firmly that it is one, but for coding specifically, it's a paradigm shift, and I hope it's here to stay.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#208It makes my work suck, sadly. Team dynamics also contributes to that, admittedly. Last year I was working on implementing a pretty big feature in our codebase, it required a lot of focus to get the business logic right and at the same time you had be very creative to make this feasible to run without hogging to much resources. When I was nearly done and worked on catching bugs, team members grew tired of waiting and…
I completely understand. We're in a phase where founders are obsessed with productivity so everything seens to work just fine and as intended with few slops. They're racing to be as productive as possible so we can get who knows where. There are times when I honestly don't even know why we're automating certain tasks anymore. In the past, we had the option of saying we didn't know something, especially when it was an…
> Today, we no longer have that option, because knowledge is just a prompt away
Something resembling knowledge anyway. A sort of shambling mound wearing knowledge like a skinsuit
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#209I'm mostly really enjoying it! While it's not my main job, I've always been a tool builder for teams I work on, so if I see a place where a little UI or utility would make people's life easier, I'd usually hack something together in a few hours and evolve it over time if people find it useful. That process is easily 10x faster than before.
My main work is training Text-to-Speech models, and the friction of experimenting with model features or ideas has dropped massively. If I want to add a new CFG implementation, or conditioning vector, 90% of the time Opus can one-shot it. It generally does a good job of making the model, inference and training changes simultaneously so everything plays nicely. Haven't had any major regressions or missed bugs yet, but we'll see!
The downside is reviewing shitty PRs where it's clear the engineer doesn't fully understand what they're doing, and just a general attitude of "I dunno, Claude suggested it" that's getting pretty exhausting.
Re: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
#210I got insanely more productive with Claude Code since Opus 4.5. Perhaps it helps that I work in AI research and keep all my projects in small prototype repos. I imagine that all models are more polished for AI research workflow because that's what frontier labs do, but yeah, I don't write code anymore. I don't even read most of it, I just ask Claude questions about the implementation, sometimes ask to show me verbatim the important bits. Obviously it does mistakes sometimes, but so do I and everyone I have ever worked with. What scares me that it does overall fewer mistakes than I do. Plan mode helps tremendously, I skip it only for small things. Insisting on strict verification suite is also important (kind of like autoresearch project).