> Of all the ways I used AI, research had by far the highest ratio of value delivered to time spent.
Seconded!
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
31–40 of 349 posts
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#32article looks like a tweet turned into 30 paragraphs. hardly any taste.
Yes, how dare someone take an idea, develop it, and publish it outside the algorithm-driven rage pit. Truly terrible behavior! /s
Expanding a thought beyond 280 characters and publishing it somewhere other than the X outrage machine is something we should be encouraging.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#33Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…
It's a very accurate and relatable post. I think one corollary that's important to note to the anti-AI crowd is that this project, even if somewhat spaghettified, will likely take orders of magnitude less time to perfect than it would for someone to create the whole thing from scratch without AI.
I often see criticism towards projects that are AI-driven that assumes that codebase is crystalized in time, when in fact humans can keep iterating with AI on it until it is better. We don't expect an AI-less project to be perfect in 0.1.0, so why expect that from AI? I know the answer is that the marketing and Twitter/LinkedIn slop makes those claims, but it's more useful to see past the hype and investigate how to use these tools which are invariably here to stay
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#34This resonates. I had a project sitting in my head for years and finally built it in about 6 weeks recently. The AI part wasn't even the hard part honestly, it was finally commiting to actually shipping instead of overthinking the architecture. The tools just made it possible to move fast enough that I didn't lose momentum and abandon it like every other time.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#35Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…
I feel like recently HN has been seeing more takes like this one and at least slightly less of the extremist clickbaity stuff. Maybe it's a sign of maturity. (Or maybe it's just fatigue with the cycle of hyping the absolute-latest model?)
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#36Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…
+1
I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article.
The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell.
I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code.
But the product wouldn’t exist without that quick and dirty prototype, and I can use Claude as a goddamned chainsaw to clean up.
On Friday, I finally added a type checker pre-commit hook and fixed the 90 existing errors (properly, no type ignores) in ~2 hours. I tried full-agentic first, and it failed miserably, then I went through error by error with Claude, we tightened up some exiting types, fixed some clunky abstractions, and got a nice, clean result.
AI-assisted coding is amazing, but IMO for production code there’s no substitute for human review and guidance.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#37This essay perfectly encapsulates my own experience. My biggest frustration is that the AI is astonishingly good at making awful slop which somehow works. It’s got no taste, no concern for elegance, no eagerness for the satisfyingly terse. My job has shifted from code writer to quality control officer. Nowhere is this more obvious in my current projects than with CRUD interface building. It will go nuts building thes…
Trim your scope and define your response format prior to asking or commanding.
Most of my questions are "in one sentence respond: long rambling context and question"
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#38Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…
It's a very accurate and relatable post. I think one corollary that's important to note to the anti-AI crowd is that this project, even if somewhat spaghettified, will likely take orders of magnitude less time to perfect than it would for someone to create the whole thing from scratch without AI. I often see criticism towards projects that are AI-driven that assumes that codebase is crystalized in time, when in fact…
> this project, even if somewhat spaghettified, will likely take orders of magnitude less time to perfect than it would for someone to create the whole thing from scratch without AI
That's a big leap of faith and... kinda contradicts the article as I understood it.
My experience is entirely opposite (and matches my understanding of the article): vibing from the start makes you take orders of magnitude more time to perfect. AI is a multiplier as an assistant, but a divisor as an engineer.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#39The author mentions a C codebase. Is AI good at coding in C now? If so, which AI systems lead in this language? Ideally: local; offline. Or do I have to wrestle it for 250 hours before it coughs up the dough? Last time I tried, the AI systems struggled with some of the most basic C code. It seemed fine with Python, but then my cat can do that.
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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#40Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…
> Some people never get to the part where they review the code. They go straight to their LinkedIn or blog and start writing (or having ChatGPT write) posts about how manual coding is dead and they’re done writing code by hand forever.
Some people review the code and declare it unusable garbage, then also go to their social media and post how AI coding is completely useless and they’re not going to use it for anything. This blog post shows the journey that anyone not in one of those two vocal minorities is going through right now.
What’s really happening is that you’re all of those people in the beginning. Those people are you as you go through the experience. You’re excited after seeing it do the impossible and in later instances you’re critical of the imperfections. It’s like the stages of grief, a sort of Kübler-Ross model for AI.