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

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

#341

Post by georgemcbay »

abcde666777 wrote: post #271
greenpizza13 wrote: post #211

I work at a very prominent AI company. We have access to every tool under the sun. There are various levels of success for all levels — managers, PMs, engineers. We have cursor with essentially unlimited Opus 4.6 and it’s fundamentally changed my workflow as a senior engineer. I find I spend much more time designing and testing my software and development time is almost entirely prompting and reviewing AI changes. I’…

I think people get a bit paranoid about coding skills atrophying. I had a period where I stopped programming for multiple years and it really only took a month to get back into the swing of things when I returned, and most of that was just re-jogging my memory on the syntax and standard library classes (C++ at the time).

A month is quite a long time compared to "I can just do this at-will from neutral at any time".

...particularly in situations where you might have to navigate a change in jobs and get back to the point where you can reasonably prove that you can program at a professional level (will be interesting to see how/if the interviewing process changes over time due to LLMs).

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

#342

Post by Arubis »

theshrike79 wrote: post #305
viccis wrote: post #268

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but the worst part for me is that a lot of management LOVES to use Claude to generate 50 page design documents, PRDs, etc., and send them to us to "please review as soon as you can". Nobody reads it, not even the people making it. I'm watching some employees just generate endless slide decks of nonsense and then waffle when asked any specific questions. If any of that is read, it is b…

If you shove clearly AI generated content at me, I will use an AI to summarize it. Or I'll walk up to your desk and ask you to explain it.

I actually think there’s almost an acceptable workflow here of using LLMs as part of the medium of communication. I’m pretty much fine with someone sending me 500 lines of slop with the stated expectation that I’ll dump it into an LLM on my end and interact with it.

It’s the asymmetric expectations—that one person can spew slop but the other must go full-effort—that for me personally feels disrespectful.

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

#343

Post by seudxs »

I started AI-assisted coding quite a while ago with "query for code to copy and paste" approach which was slow but it dramatically shifts when the LLMs are used as agents that are just AI that have access to certain things like your project's source codes, internet and some other technical docs that refines them. You can simply instruct it to change snippet of codes by mentioning them with their actions inside the chat that feeds the agent, this is done in tools like cursor, antigravity, llmanywhere. an instruction could be limited to CRUD instructions, CRUD standing for Create, Read, Update, and Delete. an update instruction looks like "change the code that does this to do that" or more precise one "change the timeout of the request to ycombinator.com to 10". having a good memory definitely helps here but forgetting isn't the end of the development or necessity to start reading the source codes yourself to know where an instruction should target but you can ask the project's interconnected source codes (i put interconnected because it generates lots of source codes for some cases like test cases that aren't used in production but are part of the project in my experience with cursor for example) goal summary if you've forgotten the big picture of the project because you came back from a break or something. I used AI agent for my last langgraph solo project only which had python and go languages, git and cursor so take my advice with a grain of salt :)

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

#344

Post by David-Brug-Ai »

tim-tday wrote: post #197
fastasucan wrote: post #117

It 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…

If someone does that simply say “no. use the latest code”

[flagged]

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

#345

Post by jcgrillo »

johntash wrote: post #222
jcgrillo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME one thing that makes this choice a very difficult one is oncall responsibilities. The thing that incentivizes code owners to keep their house in order is that their oncall experience will be a lot better. And you're the only one who is incentivized to think this way. Management certainly doesn't care. So by delegating the choice to management you're signing up for a whole bunch of extra work in the form of sleepl…

If someone is making the kind of mistakes that cause oncall issues to increase, put that person on call. It doesn't matter if they can't do anything, call them every time they cause someone else to be paged. IME too many don't care about on call unless they are personally affected.

Framed less blamefully, that's basically the central thesis of "devops". That is the notion that owning your code in production is a good idea because then you're directly incentivized to make it good. It shouldn't be a punishment, just standard practice that if you write code you're responsible for it in production.

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

#347

Post by zteppenwolf »

It's working fine for me.

I'm lucky enough to have upper management not pressuring to use it this or that way, and I'm using mostly to assist with programming languages/frameworks I'm not familiar with. Also, test cases (these sometimes comes wrong and I need to review thoroughly), updating documentation, my rubber duck, and some other repetitive/time consuming tasks.

Sometimes, if I have a simple, self-contained bug scenario where extensive debug won't be required, I ask it to find the reason. I have a high rate of success here.

However, it will not help you with avoiding anti-patterns. If you introduce one, it will indulge instead of pointing the problem out.

I did give it a shot on full vibe-coding a library into production code, and the experience was successful; I'm using the library - https://youtu.be/wRpRFM6dpuc

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

#348

Post by vesselapi »

sky2224 wrote: post #281
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #10

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 peopl…

Can you provide an example of how you actually prompt AI models? I get the feeling the difference among everyone's experiences has to do with prompting and expectation.

[dead]

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

#349

Post by GeoAtreides »

turlockmike wrote: post #125
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need to embed your best practices in your agent and keep and eye on it and refine it over time. Sincere question, how do beginners to the field (interns, juniors) do this when they don't have any best practices yet?

My advice for juniors is that it's too late to get entry level jobs for software engineering, but AI Automation engineering is just starting. Get a Claude code sub and build whatever you can imagine and focus on improving your own coding agent. Automate one more thing every day.

>improving your own coding agent

??????????

write a thousand md files with detailed prompts (and called them skills)?

is that what would get juniors hired? and paid real money? a stack of md files?

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

#350

Post by skywhopper »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #333
humbleharbinger wrote: post #213

I'm an engineer at Amazon - we use Kiro (our own harness) with Opus 4.6 underneath. Most of my gripes are with the harness, CC is way better. In terms of productivity I'm def 2-4X more productive at work, >10x more productive on my side business. I used to work overtime to deliver my features. Now I work 9-5 and am job hunting on the side while delivering relatively more features. I think a lot of people are missing…

> I have built features in 2 weeks that would take me a month just because I'd have to learn some nitty technical details that I'd never use again in my life. In the bucket of "really great things I love about AI", that would definitely be at the top. So often in my software engineering career I'd have to spend tons of time learning and understanding some new technology, some new language, some esoteric library, some…

It’s too bad, really. While it’s easy to get discouraged about such things, over the course of my career all that learning of “pointless” tech has made me a much better programmer, designer, architect, and troubleshooter. The only way you build intuition about systems is learning them deeply.
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