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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?

#411

Post by rdevilla »

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.

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

This has always been the case. Have some junior shit out a few thousand lines of code, leave, and leave it for the senior cleanup crew to figure out what the fuck just happened...

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

#412

Post by scuff3d »

stephenr wrote: post #383
scuff3d wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#413

Post by DalekBaldwin »

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.

Jump straight to the second option. You have to presume that the content they sent you has no relation whatsoever to their actual understanding of the matter.

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

#414

Post by christophilus »

jantb wrote: post #7

Using claude-code for fixing bugs in a rather huge codebase. Reviews the fixes and if i think it wrote something I would make a pr off i use it. Understanding is key I think and giving it the right context. I have about 20 years of experience of programming and I’m letting it code in a domain and language I know very well. It saves me a lot when the bug requires finding a needle in a haystack.

This is one of its best use cases. Boilerplate and research, too. It’s also super handy for tweaking my Neovim config.

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

#415

Post by flash_us0101 »

Most replies here are about writing code faster. But there's a gap nobody's talking about: AI agents are completely blind to running systems.

When you hit a runtime bug, the agent's only tool is "let me add a print statement and restart". That works for simple cases but it's the exact same log-and-restart loop we fall back to in cloud and containerized environments, just with faster typing.

Where it breaks down: timing-sensitive code, Docker services, anything where restarting changes the conditions you need to reproduce.

I've had debugging sessions where the agent burned through 10+ restart cycles on a bug that would've been obvious if it could just watch the live values.

We've given agents the ability to read and write code. We haven't given them the ability to observe running code. That's a pretty big gap.

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

#416

Post by threethirtytwo »

wg0 wrote: post #161
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…

This checks out logical speaking. The FANG code basis are very large and date back years might not necessarily be using open source frameworks rather in house libraries and frameworks none of which are certainly available to Anthropic or OpenAI hence these models have zero visibility into them. Therefore combined with the fact that these are not reasoning or thinking machines rather probabilistic (image/text) generat…

No it doesn't check out. I think it's becoming abundantly clear LLMs learn in real time as they speak to you. There's a lot of denial and people claiming they don't learn that their knowledge is fixed on the training data and this is not even remotely true at all.

LLMs learn dynamically through their context window and this learning is at a rate much faster than humans and often with capabilities greater than humans and often much worse.

For a code base as complex and as closed source as google the problems an LLM faces is largely the same as a human. How much can he fit into the context window?

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

#417

Post by threethirtytwo »

flash_us0101 wrote: post #415

Most replies here are about writing code faster. But there's a gap nobody's talking about: AI agents are completely blind to running systems. When you hit a runtime bug, the agent's only tool is "let me add a print statement and restart". That works for simple cases but it's the exact same log-and-restart loop we fall back to in cloud and containerized environments, just with faster typing. Where it breaks down: timi…

easy, give the logs timestamps, the LLM can sort the order.

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

#418

Post by vdfs »

DalekBaldwin wrote: post #413
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.

Jump straight to the second option. You have to presume that the content they sent you has no relation whatsoever to their actual understanding of the matter.

Be prepared for "I Asked claude and it said: ..." at some point you will just ask claude via a microphone

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

#419

Post by patrick451 »

Context: I work in robotics. We use mostly c++ and python. The entire team is about 200 though the subset I regularly interact with is maybe 50.

I basically don't use AI for coding at all. When I have tried it, it's just half working garbage and trying to describe what I want in natural language is just miserable. It feels like trying to communicate via smoke signals.

I'll be a classical engineer until they fire me and then go do something else. So far, that's working. We've had multiple rounds of large layoffs in the last year and somehow I'm still here.

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

#420

Post by maxaw »

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…

I quit my last job because of this. I’m pretty sure manager was using free chatgpt with no regard for context length too, because not only was it verbose it was also close to gibberish. Being asked to review urgently and estimate deadlines got old real fast
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