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Using AI to write better code more slowly

nolanlawson.com

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Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#121

Post by themanmaran »

halfcat wrote: post #107
themanmaran wrote: post #80

As I read this, I'm also working through a pretty dense feature that took a fair bit of iteration. The end result is actually significantly less code than it was about halfway through. And I was wondering if the AI actually helped me at all, since surely I could have written the code in the same time it took to iterate But! Because of AI I was able to rapidly hack out like 4 variants of this feature that I didn't lik…

So what’s the verdict? Was it worth it?

Yea worth it. The original implementation ended up being the most complex, and also not a great UX. But I didn't really get it was a worse UX until I built it and tested it out a bit.

And I wasn't attached to that complex implementation in the way I would be if I architected it from scratch, so it was easy to move on.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#122

Post by vasco »

busterarm wrote: post #82
qsera wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I argue about design and architecture all day with a robot. You will outgrow it at some point.

nullsanity's comment is dead and downvoted to oblivion but also incredibly underrated. I was more annoyed than anything that I didn't hit this moment until my 40s. Except it's not just reddit (I quit reddit 15 years ago). It's the whole internet.

What you guys don't understand is that you don't argue with people or robots to teach them. You argue to teach yourself. Until you get out of that mindset, indeed a lot of conversation will seem useless, be it people or robots.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#123

Post by julianlam »

ciconia wrote: post #118

To me the blocker with using coding agents is having to rely on a paid external service. Are there any local models that are good enough to be used for coding?

As of this month, Qwen3.6 (either the 27B or 35B-A3B) or Gemma 4 are talked about often.

Also maybe this will help: https://hnup.date/hn-sota

The qwen model is my daily driver this week.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#124

Post by noduerme »

mikepurvis wrote: post #83
aomix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking the problem to death with the AI before implementation is a nice zone for me. I feel productive, get good results out of the AI, and still largely understand the code. That’s the part of the AI revolution that I feel has made me a better engineer because I argue about design and architecture all day with a robot.

Despite the cynical sibling reply, I also feel like there's real value here. Contrary to the meme, I don't think Claude just tells me I'm brilliant, but really does push back on directions that are unproductive, helps identify when a part is overcomplicated or a dependency has become redundant, etc. Those are important things to have at least a sightline on before getting too deep into the code, even (or maybe especi…

I'm usually the one spotting redundancies and dead branches in Claude's code, not the other way around. But I think either way, what's important is questioning the process and understanding the way the code is working so that you retain a full mental model.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#125

Post by etothet »

“A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible.”

A lot of people think a lot of things, but I don’t think the majority of people think the point of using LLMs is so they can produce low-quality code. Do they produce low-quality code sometimes or often? Of course. But they also produce high-quality code very often. And sometimes they just a “fine” job.

One of the promises - and there are plenty of cases where it’s met and where it falls drastically short - is that agentic coding tools can help us code faster that is just as good or better than what a human can. One of the other big ideal payoffs is that agentic coding can allow non-programmers to create things that previously required programmers to create.

We can debate as to how successful we’ve been toward the two goals above, but I think it’s misguided to say that the majority of people think LLMs should produce lower quality code.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#126

Post by alexwwang »

So I am figuring out how to let LLM write code automatically as long as I clarify the requirements. I have made a set of skills to deal with this and it called tdd-pipeline. I eat this dog food and by several rounds of iterations to fix bugs, it works better and better. Now I feel much relax while it is working.

I open sourced it on GitHub, you may search alexwwang/tdd-pipeline to find it if you are interested in it.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#127

Post by qsera »

vasco wrote: post #122
busterarm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nullsanity's comment is dead and downvoted to oblivion but also incredibly underrated. I was more annoyed than anything that I didn't hit this moment until my 40s. Except it's not just reddit (I quit reddit 15 years ago). It's the whole internet.

What you guys don't understand is that you don't argue with people or robots to teach them. You argue to teach yourself. Until you get out of that mindset, indeed a lot of conversation will seem useless, be it people or robots.

>You argue to teach yourself.

Oh. I am aware. It is not that deep. But who you argues with still matter. There was a point where I have abandoned Reddit and HN. I came back to HN because people here also seem to have grown up. Reddit stays mostly the same.

I credit the moderation here for that, I mean allowing people to grow out of the echo chamber.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#128

Post by rdedev »

aomix wrote: post #59
bottlepalm wrote: post #4

I've hit this point with AI where it's not a simple process, but a long drawn out back and forth. I'll use AI to design the implementation of a medium sized, cross cutting feature. Review all the details, maybe iterate on just that. Then implement with Claude 4.7 Max - which runs slower, but does a better job. Then review the implementation, then have Codex GPT 5.5 xhigh fast review it - which almost always finds cor…

Talking the problem to death with the AI before implementation is a nice zone for me. I feel productive, get good results out of the AI, and still largely understand the code. That’s the part of the AI revolution that I feel has made me a better engineer because I argue about design and architecture all day with a robot.

How would you approach this problem if you are let's say token constrained due to per month limits set in your company?

What I've tried to do is make the bot write detailed spec documents, slowly building it over time as I explain the full problem.

It works for the most part but it's you have some non standard requirement, the agent seems to skip over that part of the spec document when it starts to code. Or it would have needless checks for situations that I said will never happen

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#129

Post by manmal »

bottlepalm wrote: post #114
halfcat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you stay aware of all code being written? Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never understood how one understands from reading code. Yes you can understand what that code does, but not why it was done that way instead of a different way. In the end I only understand it deeply if I end up writing it. Chatting through it is helpful to me, but having AI crank out code loses all of that context pretty quickly. I’m not d…

If you can't understand why the code is done in a certain way from reading it then the code is missing comments or needs to be refactored. Even code you write yourself, given enough time, you will forget the why unless you wrote comments. In a way comments are as much for you as they are for others. Even before AI, understanding code you didn't write is essential to working on a team of other developers. If you can't…

Codex barely writes any comments, while Claude makes a slop article for every one line commit. I’d enjoy something in the middle.

Re: Using AI to write better code more slowly

#130

Post by goatlover »

etothet wrote: post #125

“A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible.” A lot of people think a lot of things, but I don’t think the majority of people think the point of using LLMs is so they can produce low-quality code. Do they produce low-quality code sometimes or often? Of course. But they also produce high-quality code very often. And sometimes they just a “fine” job. One…

Hopefully not, but there was recent thread with multiple posters arguing that code quality doesn't matter, and quality produced by humans in the past was often terrible. So who cares, ship it was the sentiment. Let the AIs handle the growing maintenance cost, I guess?

Kind of a shocking thing to see argued on HN. Maybe it's just the vibe coders.

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