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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?

#381

Post by Xcelerate »

Izkata wrote: post #149

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…

I've been using ChatGPT to teach myself all sorts of interesting fields of mathematics that I've wanted to learn but never had the time previously. I use the Pro version to pull up as many actual literature references as I can.

I don't use it at all to program despite that being my day job for exactly the reason you mentioned. I know I'll totally forget how to program. During a tight crunch period, I might use it as a quick API reference, but certainly not to generate any code. (Absolutely not saying it's not useful for this purpose—I just know myself well enough to know how this is going to go haha)

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

#382

Post by ls612 »

I use Claude code for my research projects now, it’s incredible tbh. I’m not writing production code for millions of users I need to do data science stuff and write lots of code to do that and AI lets me focus on the parts of my research that I want to do and it makes me a lot more productive.

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

#383

Post by stephenr »

scuff3d wrote: post #324
stephenr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean suggesting arguments to provide based on name/type context?

Yeah, it usually gets the required args right based on various pieces of context. It have a big variation though between extension. If the extension can't pull context from the entire project (or at least parts of it) it becomes almost useless.

IntelliJ platform (JetBrains IDEs) has this functionality out of the box without "AI" using regular code intelligence. If all your parameters are strings it may not work well I guess but if you're using types it works quite well IME.

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

#384

Post by 0x262d »

Arubis wrote: post #342
theshrike79 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

is this better than normal communication in any way, or just not much worse?

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

#385

Post by axpy906 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #81
lnrd wrote: post #78

I work at a unicorn in EU. Claude Code has been rolled out to all of engineering with strict cost control policies, even with these in place we burn through tens of thousands of euro per months that I think could translate in 15/20 hires easily. Are we more productive than adding people to the headcount? That's a good question that I cannot answer. Some senior people that were in the AI pilot, have been using this fo…

Why did your company get claude code with token billing instead of getting everyone max plans ?

ZDR in place at API level but need enterprise contract if on a plan. Vendor lock-in and IP drivers.

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

#386

Post by gerdesj »

jghn wrote: post #340
gerdesj wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm an engineer at Amazon" Sanctioned comment?

> 10x more productive on my side business Pretty sure the answer is here :)

Quite. On the face of it: possible career faux pas.

I own (with two other folk) my own little company and hire other people. I actively encourage my troops to have a bash but I suspect that a firm like AMZ would have differing views about what used to be called moonlighting. Mind you we only turnover a bit over £1M and that is loose change down the back of a sofa for AMZ ...

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

#387

Post by koyote »

piker wrote: post #212

I am working on a sub 100KLOC Rust application and can't productively use the agentic workflows to improve that application. On the other hand, I have tried them a number of times in greenfield situations with Python and the web stack and experienced the simultaneous joy and existential dread of others. They can really stand new projects up quick. As a founder, this leaves me with what I describe as the "generation s…

If what you are doing is novel then I don't think yolo'ing it will help either. Agents don't do novel. I've even noticed this in meeting summaries produced by AI: A prioritisation meeting? AI's summary is concise, accurate, useful. A software algorithm design meeting, trying to solve a domain-specific issue? AI did not understand a word of what we discussed and the summary is completely garbled rubbish.

If all you're doing is something that already exists but you decided to architecture it in a novel way (for no tangible benefit), then I'd say starting from scratch and make it look more like existing stuff is going to help AI be more productive for you. Otherwise you're on your own unless you can give AI a really good description of what you are doing, how things are tied together etc. And even then it will probably end up going down the wrong path more often than not.

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

#389

Post by anonzzzies »

0x6d61646f wrote: post #332
philipp-gayret wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The atrophy of manually writing code is certainly real. I'd compare it to using a paper map and a compass to navigate, versus say Google Maps. I don't particularly care to lose the skill, even though being good and enjoying the programming part of making software was my main source of income for more than a decade. I just can't escape being significantly faster with a Claude Code. > he can tell what it generates is m…

have you tried using AI generated code in a non hobby project? one that has to go to production? it just allucinates packages, adds random functions that already exist, creates new random APIs. How is that not unmantainable?

We use it for 100s of projects and what you say hasn't happened for a while.
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