Ask HN: What AI tools do you use to boost productivity?

I’m mulling over an idea to make an all-in-one reading and writing tool, which empower thinking in this information overload era.

I was having a discussion with ChatGPT about development difficulties in a micro services architecture. It helped me arrive at a possible improvement using dependency injection functions like get_sentry and get_mongo that can return a MagicMock instance of the respective runtime dependency by checking a RUN_MODE environment variable. The idea solves an immediate need to allow me to bootstrap the application to a minimum functional state in a CI or pre-commit environment. We can also expand on the idea by defining RUN_MODE behaviours for development, staging, and production environments with various gRPC stubs and service mocks in some environments.

I’ve also had a great experience using ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot assist me in writing unit tests for a Dango/WagtailCMS website project. ChatGPT particularly knows some subtle nuances of the Django and Wagtail APIs. It has been like having a personal tutor. Copilot then picks up on unit test patterns to write tests based on comment prompts or function names. In some cases, Copilot is suggesting test cases that I didn’t even think of simply by pausing my cursor on a blank line.

I’ve been live streaming my open source development using these tools, in case anyone would like to see how they are making me a better developer.

https://youtube.com/@brylie

I use aider[1], python tool for coding after learning about it from the author that posted it on here some months ago. It works well in the design phase and early parts of projects. Lately I haven’t been using it as much, unfortunately, because I have been working heavily on a library that was released after 2021 and it’s not as immediately helpful a lot of the time.

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

After trying many other tools on Windows, I found them either too bloated or too rigid. So instead, I built my own tool using AutoHotkey. The end result is a single binary that's less than 1MB in size. I can define my own prompts in a simple INI file and invoke those prompts anywhere.

https://github.com/overflowy/chat-key

I use ChatGPT to get started, or as a rubber duck.

I use Copilot when I'm coding.