Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

501–510 of 657 posts

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

#502
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we'll eventually move away from using these verbose documents, presentations, etc for communication. Just do your work, thinking, solving problems, etc while verbally dumping it all out into LLM sessions as you go. When someone needs to be updated on a particular task or project, there will be a way to give them granular access to those sessions as a sort of partial "brain dump" of yours. They can ask the LLM…

That sounds intriguing. LLM as moderator or coordinator or similar.

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

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hers is one: https://github.com/mohsen1/fesh beats the best compression out there by 6% on average. Yet nobody will care because it was not hand written

That's a very interesting case. If you want I will look into this in more detail, I'm waiting for some parts so I have some time to kill.

Are you an expert in this field? I'm curious if the AI generated code here is actually good.

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

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't use JetBrains products at work. I also unfortunately do most of my coding at work in Python, which I think can confound things since not everything is typed

... you can't use JetBrains? What logic created a scenario where you can't use arguably the best range of cross platform IDEs, but you can somehow use spicy autocomplete to imitate some of their functionality, poorly?

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

#505
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also don't mind that. Summarized information exchange feels very efficient. But for sure, it seems like a societal expectation is emerging around these tools right now - expect me to put as much effort into consuming data as you did producing it. If you shat out a bunch of data from an LLM, I'm going to use an LLM to consume that data as well. And it's not reasonable for you to expect me to manually parse that data…

Concept -> LLM fluff -> LLM summary -> Recipient

This kinda risks the broken telephone problem, or when you translate from one language to another and then again to another - context and nuance is always lost.

Just give me the bullet points, it's more efficient anyway. No need to add tons of adjectives and purple prose around it to fluff it up.

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

#506

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.

"send me your prompts instead"

There's a discussion going on that if you use an LLM to generate code, should the prompts (and related stuff) be a part of the pull request.

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

#507

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?

Yes, all the time. Yes, those go to production. AI has improved significantly the past 2 years, I highly recommend you give it another try.

I don't see the behaviour you describe, maybe if your impression is that of online articles or you use a local llama model or ChatGPT from 2 years ago. Claude regularly finds and resolves duplicated code in fact. Let me give you a counter-example: For adding dependencies we run an internal whitelist for AI Agents; new dependencies go through this system, we had similar concerns. I have never seen any agent used in our organisation or at a client, in the half year or so that we run the service, hallucinate a dependency.

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

#508
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…

Getting similar vibes from freelance clients sending me overly-articulated specs for projects, making it sound like they want sophisticated implementations. Then I ask about it and they actually want like a 30 row table written in a csv. Huge whiplash.

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very interesting case. If you want I will look into this in more detail, I'm waiting for some parts so I have some time to kill.

Are you an expert in this field? I'm curious if the AI generated code here is actually good.

I've done some work on compression really long ago but I am very far from an expert in the field, in fact I'm not an expert in any field ;) The best I ever did was a way to compress video better than what was available at the time but wavelets overtook that and I have not kept current.

I'm curious about two things:

- is it really that much better (if so, that would by itself be a publishable result) where better is

  - not worse for other cases

  - always better for the cases documented
I think that's a fair challenge.

- is it correct?

And as a sidetrack to the latter: can it be understood to the point that you can prove it is correct? Unfortunately I don't have experience with your toolchain but that's a nice learning opportunity.

Question: are you familiar with

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary_corpus

https://corpus.canterbury.ac.nz/

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

#510
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.

If you shove content at me that I even suspect was AI generated I will summarily hit the delete button and probably ban you from sending me any form of communication ever again.

It's a breach of trust. I don't care if you're my friend, my boss, a stranger, or my dog - it crosses a line.

I value my time and my attention. I will willingly spend it on humans, but I most certainly won't spend it on your slop when you didn't even feel me worth making a human effort.

Post reply on HN