[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you prof...
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Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
Comment sections on AI threads tend to split into "we're all
cooked" and "AI is useless." I'd like to cut through the noise and
learn what's actually working and what isn't, from concrete
experience. If you've recently used AI tools for professional
coding work, tell us about it. What tools did you use? What worked
well and why? What challenges did you hit, and how (if at all) did
you solve them? Please share enough context (stack, project type,
team size, experience level) for others to learn from your
experience. The goal is to build a grounded picture of where AI-
assisted development actually stands in March 2026, without the hot
air.
Author : svara
Score : 183 points
Date : 2026-03-15 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
| mc-0 wrote:
| I just moved to a new team in my company that prides itself on
| being "AI-First". The work is a relatively new project that was
| stood up by a small team of two developers (both of whom seem
| pretty smart) in the last 4 months. Both acknowledged that some
| parts of their tech stack, they just don't at all understand
| (next.js frontend). The backend is a gigantic monorepo of
| services glued together.
|
| The manager & a senior dev on my first day told me to "Don't try
| to write code yourself, you should be using AI". I got encouraged
| to use spec-driven development and frameworks like superpowers,
| gsd, etc.
|
| I'm definitely moving faster using AI in this way, but I
| legitimately have no idea what the fuck I am doing. I'm making
| PRs I don't know shit about, I don't understand how it works
| because there is an emphasis on speed, so instead of ramping up
| in a languages / technologies I've never used, I'm just shipping
| a ton of code I didn't write and have no real way to vet like
| someone who has been working with it regularly and actually has
| mastered it.
|
| This time last year, I was still using AI, but using it as a pair
| programming utility, where I got help learn to things I don't
| know, probe topics / concepts I need exposure to, and reason
| through problems that arose.
|
| I can't control the direction of how these tools are going to
| evolve & be used, but I would love if someone could explain to me
| how I can continue to grow if this actually is the future of
| development. Because while I am faster, the hope seems to be AI /
| Agents / LLMs will only ever get better and I will never need to
| have an original thought or use crtical thinking.
|
| I have just about 4 years of professional experience. I had about
| 10 - 12 months of the start of my career where I used google to
| learn things before LLMs became sole singular focus.
|
| I wake up every day with existential dread of what the future
| looks like.
| j3k3 wrote:
| A new way of operating is forced down your throat due to
| expectations of how the technology will evolve. What actually
| happens is highly variable - on the spectrum between a huge
| positive and negative surprise.
|
| The people forcing it down you do not care about the long-term
| ramifications.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| This app sounds destined for total disaster.
| lazystar wrote:
| my team is anti-AI. my code review requests are ignored, or are
| treated more strictly than others. it feels coordinated - i will
| have to push back the launch date of my project as a result.
|
| another teammate added a length check to an input field, and his
| request was merged near instantly, even though it had zero unit
| testing. this team is incredibly cooked in the long term, i just
| need to ensure that i survive the short term somehow.
| j3k3 wrote:
| " this team is incredibly cooked in the long term" they're not
| actually.
|
| People like you are making sunk expenditures whilst the models
| are evolving... they can just wait until the models get to
| 'steady-state' to figure out the optimal workflow. They will
| have lost out on far less.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| it sounds like you might have wasted your team's time
| previously and now they don't trust the code you put up with a
| PR. Maybe you can do something to improve your relationship
| with them?
|
| As a sidenote, I highly doubt they are cooked longterm. Using
| AI is not exactly skilled labor. If they want or need I'm sure
| they could learn patterns/workflows in like an afternoon. As
| things go on it will only get easier to use.
| j3k3 wrote:
| Exactly. I find it hilarious that the people down-voted my
| comment.
|
| Like yeah sorry... not everyone has to be a risk-taker. Many
| people like to observe and await to see what new techniques
| emerge that can be exploited.
| dude250711 wrote:
| _> another teammate added a length check to an input field, and
| his request was merged near instantly, even though it had zero
| unit testing_
|
| That sounds extremely reasonable though?
| bitwize wrote:
| Code that does not take a pre-existent unit test from failing
| to passing is by definition broken.
| jasbrg wrote:
| i take it you're meaning i'm the "treat every gun as if
| it's loaded" sense and not actually
| fastasucan wrote:
| No its not.
| block_dagger wrote:
| I would start looking for a job at an AI-leaning firm.
| drrob wrote:
| I've only recently begun using copilot auto-complete in Visual
| Studio using Claude (doing C# development/maintenance of three
| SaaS products). I've been a coder since 1999.
|
| The suggestions are correct about 40% of the time, so I'm
| actually surprised when they're right, rather than becoming
| reliant on them. It saves me maybe 10 minutes a day.
| scuff3d wrote:
| The only part AI auto complete I found I really like is when I
| have a function call that takes like a dozen arguments, and the
| auto complete can just shove it all together for me. Such a
| nice little improvement.
| stephenr wrote:
| Do you mean suggesting arguments to provide based on
| name/type context?
| drrob wrote:
| My least favourite part of the auto complete is how wordy the
| comments it wants to create are. I never use the comments it
| suggests.
| jantb wrote:
| 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.
| daringrain32781 wrote:
| Like a lot of things, it's neither and somewhere in the middle.
| It's net useful even if just for code reviews that make you think
| about something you may have missed. I personally also use it to
| assist in feature development, but it's not allowed to write or
| change anything unless I approve it (and I like to look at the
| diff for everything)
| mono442 wrote:
| I almost don't write any code by hand anymore and was able to
| take up a second part-time job thanks to genai.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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
| people talking about how they're now 10x more productive, and
| everyone needs to do x y an z now. I just don't know any of these
| people.
|
| Non-professionally, it's amazing how well it does on a small
| greenfield task, and I have seen that 10x improvement in
| velocity. But, at work, close to 0 so far.
|
| Of the posts I've seen at work, they typically tend to be teams
| doing something new / greenfield-ish or a refactor. So I'm not
| surprised by their results.
| asdff wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the shortcomings you find in professional
| setting that aren't coming up on personal projects? With it
| handling greenfield tasks are you perhaps referring to the
| usual sort of boilerplate code/file structure setup that is
| step 0 with using a lot of libraries?
| svara wrote:
| Could you say more on how the tasks where it works vs. doesn't
| work differ? Just the fact that it's both small and greenfield
| in the one case and presumably neither in the other?
| eranation wrote:
| Wow, that's such a drastic different experience than mine. May
| I ask what toolset are you using? Are you limited to using your
| home grown "AcmeCode" or have full access to Claude Code /
| Cursor with the latest and greatest models, 1M context size,
| full repo access?
|
| I see it generating between 50% to 90% accuracy in both small
| and large tasks, as in the PRs it generates range between being
| 50% usable code that a human can tweak, to 90% solution (with
| the occasional 100% wow, it actually did it, no comments, let's
| merge)
|
| I also found it to be a skillset, some engineers seem to find
| it easier to articulate what they want and some have it easier
| to think while writing code.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I used to think that the people who keep saying (in March
| 2026) that AI does not generate good code are just not smart
| and ask stupid prompts.
|
| I think I've amended that thought. They are not necessarily
| lacking in intelligence. I hypothesize that LLMs pick up on
| optimism and pessimism among other sentiments in the incoming
| prompt: someone prompting with no hope that the result will
| be useful end up with useless garbage output and vice versa.
| bitwize wrote:
| This is kinda like that thing about how psychic mediums
| supposedly can't medium if there's a skeptic in the room.
| Goes to show that AI really is a modern-day ouija board.
| ctrust wrote:
| The accurate inferences that can be drawn from subtle
| linguistic attributes should freak you out more than they
| do.
| alchemism wrote:
| Switching one good synonym can send the model off an
| entirely different direction in response, or so I've
| observed.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Exactly. You have to manifest at a high vibrational
| frequency.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Thanks for the laugh.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It's probably more to do with the intelligence required to
| know when a specific type of code will yield poor future
| coding integrations and large scale implementation.
|
| It's pretty clear that people think greenfield projects can
| constantly be slopified and that AI will always be able to
| dig them another logical connection, so it doesn't matter
| which abstraction the AI chose this time; it can always be
| better.
|
| This is akin to people who think we can just keep using oil
| to fuel technological growth because it'll some how improve
| the ability of technology to solve climate problems.
|
| It's akin to the techno capitalist cult of "effective
| altruism" that assumes there's no way you could f'up the
| world that you can't fix with "good deeds"
|
| There's a lot of hidden context in evaluating the output of
| LLMs, and if you're just looking at todays success, you'll
| come away with a much different view that if you're looking
| at next year's.
|
| Optimism is only then, in this case, that you believe the
| AI will keep getting more powerful that it'll always clean
| up todays mess.
|
| I call this techno magic, indistinguishable from religious
| 'optimism'
| robbbbbbbbbbbb wrote:
| Don't know why you're getting downvoted, this is a
| fascinating hypothesis and honestly super believable. It
| makes way more sense than the intuitive belief that there's
| actually something under the human skin suit
| _understanding_ any of this code.
| jatins wrote:
| Experience depends on which FAANG it is. Amazon for example
| doesn't allow Claude Code or Codex so you are stuck with
| whatever internal tool they have
|
| Meta, despite competing with these, is open to let their devs
| use better off the shelf tools.
| j3k3 wrote:
| Meta is doing something healthy - signalling that it is
| behind with its LLM efforts. Nothing wrong with that.
| konaraddi wrote:
| I work at aws and generally use Claude Opus 4.6 1M with Kiro
| (aws's public competitor to Claude Code). My experience is
| positive. Kiro writes most of my code. My complaints:
|
| 1. Degraded quality over longer context window usage. I have
| to think about managing context and agents instead of
| focusing solely on the task.
|
| 2. It's slow (when it's "thinking"). Especially when it's
| tasked with something simple (e.g., I could ask Claude Opus
| to commit code and submit for review but it's just faster if
| I run the commands myself and I don't want to have to think
| about conditionally switching to Haiku / faster models mid
| task execution).
|
| 3. It often requires a lot of upfront planning and feedback
| loop set up to the extent that sometimes I wonder if it
| would've been faster if I did it myself.
|
| A smarter model would be great but there are bigger
| productivity gains to be had with a good set up, a faster
| model, and abstracting away the need to think about agents or
| context usage. I'm still figuring out a good set up.
| Something with the speed of Haiku with the reasoning of Opus
| without the overhead of having to think about the management
| of agents or context would be sweet.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > A smarter model would be great but there are bigger
| productivity gains to be had with a good set up, a faster
| model, and abstracting away the need to think about agents
| or context usage. I'm still figuring out a good set up.
| Something with the speed of Haiku with the reasoning of
| Opus without the overhead of having to think about the
| management of agents or context would be sweet.
|
| I was thinking about this recently. This kind of setup is a
| Holy Grail everyone is searching for. Make the damn tool
| produce the right output more of the time. And yet, despite
| testing the methods provided by the people who claim they
| get excellent results, I still come to the point where the
| it gets off rails. Nevertheless, since practically
| everybody works on resolving this particular issue, and
| huge amounts of money have been poured into getting it
| right, I hope in the next year or so we will finally have
| something we can reliably use.
| David-Brug-Ai wrote:
| The context degradation problem gets much worse when you
| have multiple agents or models touching the same project.
| One agent compacts, loses what it knew, and now the human
| is the only source of truth for what actually happened vs
| what was reported done. If that human isn't a coder, they
| can't verify by reading the source either.
|
| I've been working on this and landed on a pattern I call a
| "mechanical ledger", basically a structured state file that
| sits outside any context window and gets updated as a side
| effect of work, not as a step anyone remembers to do. Every
| commit writes to it, every failed patch writes to it, every
| test run writes to it. When a session starts (or an agent
| compacts), it reads the ledger and rebuilds context from
| ground truth instead of from memory.
|
| Its not a novel idea really, its basically what ops teams
| do with runbooks and state files, but applied to the AI
| agent handoff problem. The interesting bit is making the
| updates mechanical so no agent can forget to do it.
| tim-tday wrote:
| Context degradation is a real problem.
| goalieca wrote:
| I can second this. I've never had a problem writing short
| scripts and glue code in stuff ive mastered. In places I
| actually need help, I'm finding it slows me down.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Also at FAANG. I think I am using the tools more than my peers
| based on my conversations. The first few times I tried our AI
| tooling, it was extremely hit and miss. But right around
| December the tooling improved a lot, and is a lot more
| effective. I am able to make prototypes very quickly. They are
| seldom check-in ready, but I can validate assumptions and
| ideas. I also had a very positive experience where the LLM
| pointed out a key flaw in an API I had been designing, and I
| was able to adjust it before going further into the process.
|
| Once the plan is set, using the agentic coder to create smaller
| CLs has been the best avenue for me. You don't want to generate
| code faster than you and your reviewers can comprehend it.
| It'll feel slow, but check ins actually move faster.
|
| I will say it's not all magic and success. I have had the AI
| lead me down some dark corners, assuring me one design would
| work when actually it is a bit outdated or not quite the right
| fit for the system we are building for because of reasons. So,
| I wouldn't really say that it's a 10x multiplier or anything,
| but I'm definitely getting things done faster than I could on
| my own. Expertise on the part of the user is still crucial.
|
| One classic issue I used to run into, is doing a small refactor
| and then having to manually fix a bunch of tests. It is so much
| simpler to ask the LLM to move X from A to B and fix any test
| failures. Then I circle back in a few minutes to review what
| was done and fix any issues.
|
| The other thing is, it has visibility for the wider code base,
| including some of our infrastructure that we're dependent on.
| There have been a couple times in the past quarter where our
| build is busted by an external team, and I am able to ask the
| LLM given the timeframe and a description of the issue, the
| exact external failure that caused it. I don't really know how
| long it would have taken to resolve the issue otherwise, since
| the issues were missed by their testing. That said, I gotta
| wonder if those breakages were introduced by LLM use.
|
| My job hasn't been this fun in a long, long time and I am a
| little uneasy about what these tools are going to mean for my
| personal job security, but I don't know how we can put the
| genie back into the bottle at this point.
| wg0 wrote:
| 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)
| generators, they can't generate what they haven't seen.
| szatkus wrote:
| That's why coding agents usually scans various files to
| figure out how to work in a particular codebase. I work with
| very large and old project, and Codex most of time manages to
| work with our frameworks.
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| Same here. My take is that the codebase is too large and
| complex for it to find the right patterns.
|
| It does work sometimes. The smaller the task, the better.
| peab wrote:
| >I am yet to successfully prompt it and get a working commit.
|
| May I ask what you're working on?
| tim-tday wrote:
| This is wild. I'm on the other end.
|
| I've probably prompted 10,000 lines of working code in the last
| two months. I started with terraform which I know backwards and
| forwards. Works perfectly 95% of the time and I know where it
| will go wrong so I watch for that. (Working both green field,
| in other existing repos and with other collaborators)
|
| Moved on to a big data processing project, works great, needed
| a senior engineer to diagnose one small index problem which he
| identified in 30s. (But I'd bonked on for a week because in
| some cases I just don't know what I don't know)
|
| Meanwhile a colleague wanted a sample of the data. Vibe coded
| that. (Extract from zip without decompressing) He wanted
| randomized. One shot. Done. Then he wanted randomized across 5
| categories. Then he wanted 10x the sample size. Data request
| completed before the conversion was over. I would have worked
| on that for three hours before and bonked if I hit the limit of
| my technical knowledge.
|
| Built a monitoring stack. Configured servers, used it to
| troubleshoot dozens of problems.
|
| For stuff I can't do, now I can do. For stuff I could do with
| difficulty now I can do with ease. For stuff I could do easily
| now I can do fast and easy.
|
| Your vastly different experience is baffling and alien to me.
| (So thank you for opening my eyes)
| sky2224 wrote:
| Can you provide an example of how you actually prompt AI
| models? I get the feeling the difference among everyone's
| experiences has to do with prompting and expectation.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I work for a university. We've got a dedicated ChatGPT instance
| but haven't been approved to use a harness yet. Some devs did a
| pilot project and approval/licenses are supposedly coming soon.
| stephbook wrote:
| I develop prototypes using Claude Code. The dead boring stuff.
|
| "Implement JWT token verification and role checking in Spring
| Boot. Secure some endpoints with Oauth2, some with API key, some
| public."
|
| C# and Java are so old, whatever solutions you find are 5 years
| out of date. Having an agent implement and verify the foundation
| is the perfect fit. There's no design, just ever-chaning
| framework magic. I'd do the same "Google and debug" cycle, but 10
| times slower.
| hdhdhsjsbdh wrote:
| It has made my job an awful slog, and my personal projects move
| faster.
|
| At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI - not
| just coding - then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and
| time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to
| merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the
| feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the
| main project. It also included a ton of stuff you don't need in
| the first pass - a ton of error checking and hand-rolled parsing,
| etc, that I had to spend over a week unrolling so that I could
| trim it down and redesign it to work in the main codebase. It was
| a slog, and it also made me look bad because it took me forever
| compared to the team who originally churned it out almost
| instantly. AI tools are not good at this kind of design
| deconflicting task, so while it's easy to get the initial concept
| out the gate almost instantly, you can't just magically fit it
| into the bigger codebase without facing the technical debt you've
| generated.
|
| In my personal projects, I get to experience a bit of the fun I
| think others are having. You can very quickly build out new
| features, explore new ideas, etc. You have to be thoughtful about
| the design because the codebase can get messy and hard to build
| on. Often I design the APIs and then have Claude critique them
| and implement them.
|
| I think the future is bleak for people in my spot professionally
| - not junior, but also not leading the team. I think the middle
| will be hollowed out and replaced with principals who set
| direction, coordinate, and execute. A privileged few will be
| hired and developed to become leaders eventually (or strike gold
| with their own projects), but everyone in between is in trouble.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI -
| not just coding - then task me with cleaning it up.
|
| This has to be the most thankless job for the near future. It's
| hard and you get about as much credit as the worker who cleans
| up the job site after the contractors are done, even though
| you're actually fixing structural defects.
|
| And god forbid you introduce a regression bug cleaning up some
| horrible redundant spaghetti code.
| j3k3 wrote:
| Lol you may be on to something there.. 'a code janitor'.
| hdhdhsjsbdh wrote:
| Near future being the key term here imo. The entire task I
| mentioned was not an engineering problem, but a communication
| issue. The two project owners could have just talked to each
| other about the design, then coded it correctly in the first
| pass, obviating the need for the code janitor. Once orgs
| adapt to this new workflow, they'll replace the code janitors
| with much cheaper Claude credits.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| > did not obey the API design of the main project
|
| If they're handing you broken code call them out on it. Say
| this doesn't do what it says it does, did you want me to create
| a story for redoing all this work?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I've heard of human engineers who are like that. "10x", but it
| doesn't actually _work_ with the environment it needs to work
| in. But they sure got it to "feature complete" fast. The
| problem is, that's a long way from "actually done".
| ramraj07 wrote:
| If you dont take a stand and refuse to clean their mess, aren't
| you part of the problem? No self respecting proponent of AI
| enabled development should suggest that the engineers
| generating the code are still not personally responsible for
| its quality.
| borski wrote:
| Came here to say this. The right solution to this is still
| the same as it always was - teach the juniors what good code
| looks like, and how to write it. Over time, they will learn
| to clean up the LLM's messes on their own, improving both
| jobs.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the
| impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting
| fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, <5k
| employees) is all-in on AI with the goal of having 100% of
| our code AI generated within the next year. We have all the
| same successes and failures as everyone else, there's nothing
| special about our case, but our technical leadership is
| fundamentally convinced that this is both viable and
| necessary, and will not be told otherwise.
|
| People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made
| to leave the organization.
|
| Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make
| about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake
| virtually every time I've joined a company: I make
| performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code
| readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it: but if
| you're not shipping _features,_ if you 're not driving the
| income needle, you have a much more difficult time framing
| your value to a non-engineering audience, who ultimately sign
| the paychecks.
|
| Obviously this varies wildly by organization, but it's been
| true everywhere I've worked to varying degrees. Some
| companies (and bosses) are more self-aware than others, which
| can help for framing the conversation (and retaining one's
| sanity), but at the end of the day if I'm making a stand
| about how bad AI quality is, but my AI-using coworker has
| shipped six medium sized features, I'm not winning that
| argument.
|
| It doesn't help that I think non-engineers view code quality
| as a technical boogeyman and an internal issue to their
| engineering divisions. Our technical leadership's attitude
| towards our incidents has been "just write better code,"
| which... Well. I don't need to explain the ridiculousness of
| that statement in this forum, but it undermines most people's
| criticism of AI. Sure, it writes crap code and misses
| business requirements; but in the eyes of my product team?
| That's just dealing with engineers in general. It's not like
| they can tell the difference.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Unfortunately not many companies seem to require engineers
| to cycle between "feature" and "maintainability" work -
| hence those looking for the low-hanging fruits and know how
| to virtue signal seem to build their career on "features"
| while engineers passionate about correct solutions are left
| to pay for it while also labelled as "inefficient" by
| management. It's all a clown show, especially now with
| vibe-coding - no wonder we have big companies having had
| multiple incidents since vibing started taking off.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Shipping "quality only" work for a long time can be
| stressful for your colleagues and the product teams.
|
| You're much better off mixing both (quality work _and_
| product features).
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| "aren't you part of the problem?"
|
| Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part
| of the problem"?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Employees, especially ones as well leveraged and overpaid
| as software engineers, are not victims. They can leave.
| They _should_ leave. Great engineers are still able to bet
| better paying jobs all the time.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Employees are not victims. Sounds like a universal
| principle.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Great engineers are still able to bet better paying
| jobs all the time
|
| I know a lot of people who tried playing this game
| frequently during COVID, then found themselves stuck in a
| bad place when the 0% money ran out and companies weren't
| eager in hiring someone whose resume had a dozen jobs in
| the past 6 years.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| You obviously haven't gone job hunting in 2026
|
| I hope you get the privilege soon
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and refuse to clean their mess
|
| You can should speak up when tasks are poorly defined,
| underestimated, or miscommunicated.
|
| Try to flat out "refuse" assigned work and you'll be swept
| away in the next round of layoffs, replaced by someone who
| knows how to communicate and behave diplomatically.
| arwhatever wrote:
| ramraj07 went on to clarify that they were advocating for
| putting the onus for cleanup back on mess generators.
|
| They clearly were not advocating for flat out refusing.
| dude250711 wrote:
| _> It was a slog, and it also made me look bad because it took
| me forever compared to the team who originally churned it out
| almost instantly._
|
| The hell you are playing hero for? Delegate the choice to
| manager: ruin the codebase or allocate two weeks for clean-up -
| their choice. If the magical AI team claim they can do
| integration faster - let them.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| IME one thing that makes this choice a very difficult one is
| oncall responsibilities. The thing that incentivizes code
| owners to keep their house in order is that their oncall
| experience will be a lot better. And you're the only one who
| is incentivized to think this way. Management certainly
| doesn't care. So by delegating the choice to management
| you're signing up for a whole bunch of extra work in the form
| of sleepless oncall shifts.
| johntash wrote:
| If someone is making the kind of mistakes that cause oncall
| issues to increase, put that person on call. It doesn't
| matter if they can't do anything, call them every time they
| cause someone else to be paged.
|
| IME too many don't care about on call unless they are
| personally affected.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Just reply with this to every AI programming task:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
|
| It's just plain unprofessional to just YOLO shit with AI and
| force actual humans to read to code even if the "author" hasn't
| read it.
|
| Also API design etc. should be automatically checked by tooling
| and CI builds, and thus PR merges, should be denied until the
| checks pass.
| visarga wrote:
| I think you need coding style guide files in each repo,
| including preferred patterns & code examples. Then you will see
| less and less of that.
| dawnerd wrote:
| We've had this too and made a change to our code review
| guidelines to mention rejection if code is clearly just ai
| slop. We've let like four contractors go so far over it. Like
| ya they get work done fast but then when it comes to making it
| production ready they're completely incapable. Last time we
| just merged it anyways to hit a budget it set everyone back and
| we're still cleaning up the mess.
| devld wrote:
| I'm repeating this 3rd time, but, a non-technical client of mine
| has whipped up an impressive SaaS prototype with tons of
| features. They still need help with the cleanup, it's all slop,
| but I was doing many small coding requests for that client. Those
| gigs will simply disappear.
|
| I just got started using Claude very recently. I have not been in
| the loop how much better it got. Now it's obvious that no one
| will write code by hand. I genuinely fear for my ability to make
| a living as soon as 2 years from now, if not sooner. I figure the
| only way is to enter the red queen race and ship some good
| products. This is the positive I see. If I put 30h/week into
| something, I have productivity of 3 people. If it's a weekend
| project at 10h/week, I have now what used to be that full week of
| productivity. The economics of developing products solo have
| vastly changed for the better.
| pgt wrote:
| I am getting disproportionately good results with the models by
| following a process: spec -> plan -> critique -> improve plan ->
| implement plan.
| CharlesW wrote:
| If I may "yes, and" this: spec - plan - critique - improve plan
| - implement plan - _code review_
|
| It may sound absurd to review an implementation with the same
| model you used to write it, but it works extremely well. You
| can optionally crank the "effort" knob (if your model has one)
| to "max" for the code review.
| frumiousirc wrote:
| A blanket follow-up "are you sure this is the best way to do
| it?"
|
| Frequently returns, "Oh, you are absolutely correct, let me
| redo this part better."
| jgilias wrote:
| You should start a new session for the code review to make
| sure the context window is not polluted with the work on
| implementation itself.
|
| At the end of the day it's an autocomplete. So if you ask
| "are you sure?" then "oh, actually" is a statistically
| likely completion.
| afroisalreadyin wrote:
| Can you give a little more detail how you execute these steps?
| Is there a specific tool you use, or is it simply different
| kinds of prompts?
| pgt wrote:
| I wrote it down here:
| https://x.com/BraaiEngineer/status/2016887552163119225
|
| However, I have since condensed this into 2 prompts:
|
| 1. Write plan in Plan Mode
|
| 2. (Exit Plan Mode) Critique -> Improve loop -> Implement.
| ramoz wrote:
| I follow a very similar workflow, with manual human review of
| plans and continuous feedback loops with the plan iterations
|
| See me in action here. It's a quick demo:
| https://youtu.be/a_AT7cEN_9I
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| similar approach
| gnerd00 wrote:
| FAANG colleague writes this week -- "I am currently being eaten
| alive by AI stuff for my non-( _foss-project_ ) work. I spend
| most of my day slogging through AI generated comments and code
| trying to figure out what is good, not good, or needs my help to
| become good. Or I'm trying to figure out how to prompt the tools
| to do what I want them to do"
|
| This fellow is one of the few mature software engineers I have
| ever met who is rigorously and consistently productive in a very
| challenging mature code base year in and year out. or WAS .. yes
| this is from coughgooglecough in California
| mattmanser wrote:
| I must admit I'm totally lost on what this is trying to
| communicate.
|
| What is "non-(foss-project) work".
|
| Is this person saying AI is bad, because it's generating so
| much, or good, because they're using it?
| wrs wrote:
| On two greenfield web apps using straightforward stuff (Preact,
| Go, PostgreSQL) Claude Code has been very helpful. Especially
| with Claude Code and Opus >= 4.5, adding an incremental feature
| mostly just works. One of these is sort of a weird IDE, and Opus
| even does OK with obscureish things like CodeMirror grammars. I
| literally just write a little paragraph describing what I want,
| have it write the code and tests, give it a quick review, and 80%
| of the time it's like, great, no notes.
|
| To be clear, this is not vibecoding. I have a strong sense of the
| architecture I want, and explicitly keep Claude on the desired
| path much like I would a junior programmer. I also insist on
| sensible unit and E2E test coverage with every incremental
| commit.
|
| I will say that after several months of this the signalling
| between UI components is getting a bit spaghettilike, but that
| would've happened anyway, and I bet Claude will be good at
| restructuring it when I get around to that.
|
| I also work in a giant Rails monolith with 15 years of
| accumulated cruft. In that area, I don't write a whole lot, but
| CC Opus 4.6 is fantastic for _reading_ the code. Like, ask "what
| are all the ways you can authenticate an API endpoint?" and it
| churns away for 5 minutes and writes a nice summary of all four
| that it found, what uses them, where they're implemented, etc.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| I use Cursor and have been pretty happy with the Plan -> Revise
| -> Build -> Correct flow. I don't write everything with it, but
| the planning step does help me clarify my thoughts at times.
|
| One of the things that has helped the most is all the
| documentation I wrote inside the repository _before_ I started
| using AI. It was intended for consumption by other engineers, but
| I think Cursor has consumed it more than any human. I 've even
| managed to make improvements _not by having AI update it_ , but
| asking AI "What unanswered questions do you have based on reading
| the documentation?" It has helped me fill in gaps and add
| clarity.
|
| Another thing I've gotten a ton of value with is having it author
| diagrams. I've had it create diagrams with both the mermaid
| syntax and AWSDAC (Diagram-as-Code). I've always found crafting
| diagrams a painstaking process. I have it make a first pass by
| analyzing my code + configuration, then make corrections and
| adjustments by explaining the changes I want.
|
| In my own PRs, I have been in the habit of posting my Cursor Plan
| document and Transcript so that others can learn from it. I've
| also encouraged other team members to do the same.
|
| I feel bad for any teams that are being mandated to use a certain
| amount of AI. It seems to me that the only way to make it work is
| by having teams experiment with it and figure out how to best use
| it given their product and the team's capacity. AI is like a pair
| of Wile-E-Coyote rocket skates. It'll get you somewhere fast, but
| unless you've cleared the road of debris and pointed in exactly
| the right direction, you're going to careen off a cliff or into a
| wall.
| eranation wrote:
| What you said about "we're all cooked" and "AI is useless" is
| literally me and everyone I know switching between the two on an
| hourly basis...
|
| I find it the most exciting time for me as a builder, I can just
| get more things done.
|
| Professionally, I'm dreading for our future, but I'm sure it will
| be better than I fear, worse than I hope.
|
| From a toolset, I use the usual, Cursor (Super expensive if you
| go with Opus 4.6 max, but their computer use is game changing,
| although soon will become a commodity), Claude code (pro max
| plan) - is my new favorite. Trying out codex, and even copilot as
| it's practically free if you have enterprise GitHub. I'm going to
| probably move to Claude Code, I'm paying way too much for Cursor,
| and I don't really need tab completion anymore... once Claude
| Code will have a decent computer use environment, I'll probably
| cancel my Cursor account. Or... I'll just use my own with
| OpenClaw, but I'm not going to give it any work / personal
| access, only access to stuff that is publicly available (e.g. run
| sanity as a regular user). Playing with skills, subagents, agent
| teams, etc... it's all just markdowns and json files all the way
| down...
|
| About our professional future:
|
| I'm not going to start learning to be a plumber / electrician /
| A/C repair etc, and I am not going to recommend my children to do
| so either, but I am not sure I will push them to learn Computer
| Science, unless they really want to do Computer _Science_.
|
| What excites me the most right now is my experiments with
| OpenClaw / NanoClaw, I'm just having a blast.
|
| tl;dr most exciting yet terrifying times of my life.
| scuff3d wrote:
| I've gone back and forth on it a lot myself, but lately I've
| been more optimistic, for a couple of reasons.
|
| While the final impact LLMs will have is yet to be determined
| (the hype cycle has to calm down, we need time to see impacts
| in production software, and there is inevitably going to be
| some kind of collapse in the market at some point), its
| undoubtable that it will improve overall productivity (though I
| think it's going to be far more nuanced then most people
| think). But with that productivity improvement will come a
| substantial increase in complexity and demand for work. We see
| this playout every single time some tool comes along and makes
| engineers in any field more productive. Those changes will also
| take time, but I suspect we're going to see a larger number of
| smaller teams working on more projects.
|
| And ultimately, this change is coming for basically all
| industries. The only industries that might remain totally
| unaffected are ones that rely entirely on manual labor, but
| even then the actual business side of the business will also be
| impacted. At the end of the day I think it's better to be in a
| position to understand and (even to a small degree) influence
| the way things are going, instead of just being along for the
| ride.
|
| If the only value someone brings is the ability to take a spec
| from someone else and churn out a
| module/component/class/whatever, they should be very very
| worried right now. But that doesn't describe a single software
| engineer I know.
| saadn92 wrote:
| Exceptionally well. I've been using it for my side project for
| the last 7 months and have learned how to use it really well on a
| rather large codebase now. My side project has about 100k LOC and
| most of it is AI generated, though I do heavily review and edit.
| mellosouls wrote:
| It churns through boring stuff but it's like I imagine the
| intellectual equivalent of breaking in a wild horse at times, so
| capable, so fast but easy to find yourself in a pile on the
| floor.
|
| I'm learning all the time and it's fun, exasperating,
| tremendously empowering and very definitely a new world.
| jacquesm wrote:
| For those of you for who it is working: show your code, please.
| zcw100 wrote:
| Why so every armchair reviewer can yell, "Slop!"?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Guidelines meditation for you.
| sigmar wrote:
| https://github.com/search?q=author%3AClaude&type=commits
| johnfn wrote:
| Why is this the attitude when it comes to AI? Can you imagine
| someone saying "please provide your code" when they claim that
| Rust sped up their work repo or typescript reduced errors in
| production?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, I can absolutely imagine that.
| johnfn wrote:
| Eh, sorry, I may have been too quick to judge, but in the
| past when I have shared examples of AI-generated code to
| skeptics, the conversation rapidly devolves into personal
| attacks on my ability as an engineer, etc.
| thangalin wrote:
| I'll bite. Here's a 99.9% vibe-coded raw Git repository reader
| suitable for self-hosted or shared host environments:
|
| https://repo.autonoma.ca/treetrek
|
| There's still some work to do on the rendering side of model
| objects. Developing the syntax highlighting rules for 40
| languages and file formats in about 10 minutes was amazing to
| see.
|
| https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Cool, thank you.
|
| Edit, great example. What is your long term maintenance
| strategy, do you keep the original prompts around so you can
| refine them later or do you dig into the source?
|
| Would love to see more of your workflow.
| sroerick wrote:
| Here's one success I had -
|
| https://github.com/sroerick/pakkun
|
| It's git for ETL. I haven't looked at the code, but I've been
| using it pretty effectively for the last week or two. I
| wouldn't feel comfortable recommending it to anybody else, but
| it was basically one-shotted. I've been dogfooding it on a
| number of projects, had the LLM iterate on it a bit, and I'm
| generally very happy with the ergonomics.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Daily Claude user via Cursor.
|
| What works:
|
| -Just pasting the error and askig what's going on here.
|
| -"How do I X in Y considering Z?"
|
| -Single-use scripts.
|
| -Tab (most of the time), although that doesn't seem to be Claude.
|
| What doesn't:
|
| -Asking it to actually code. It's not going to do the whole thing
| and even if, it will take shortcuts, occasionally removing
| legitimate parts of the application.
|
| -Tests. Obvious cases it can handle, but once you reach a certain
| threshold of coverage, it starts producing nonsense.
|
| Overall, it's amazing at pattern matching, but doesn't actually
| understand what it's doing. I had a coworker like this - same
| vibe.
| eranation wrote:
| Opus 4.5 max (1m tokens) and above were the tipping point for
| me, before that, I agree with 100% of what you said.
|
| But even with Opus 4.6 max / GPT 5.4 high it takes time, you
| need to provide the right context, add skills / subagents,
| include tribal knowledge, have a clear workflow, just like you
| onboard a new developer. But once you get there, you can
| definitely get it to do larger and larger tasks, and you
| definitely get (at least the illusion) that it "understands"
| that it's doing.
|
| It's not perfect, but definitely can code entire features, that
| pass rigorous code review (by more than one human + security
| scanners + several AI code reviewers that review every single
| line and ensure the author also understands what they wrote)
| dxxmxnd wrote:
| I also work at big tech. Claude code is very good and I have not
| written code by hand in months. These are very messy codebases as
| well.
|
| I have to very much be in the loop and constantly guiding it with
| clarifying questions but it has made running multiple projects in
| parallel much easier and has handled many tedious tasks.
| al_borland wrote:
| For asking quick questions that would normally send me to a
| search engine, it's pretty helpful. It's also decent (most of the
| time) and throwing together some regex.
|
| For throw away code, I might let the agent do some stuff. For
| example, we needed to test timing on DNS name resolution on a
| large number of systems to try and track down if that was causing
| our intermittent failures. I let an agent write that and was able
| to get results faster than if I did it myself, and I ultimately
| didn't have to care about the how... I just needed something to
| show to the network team to prove it was their problem.
|
| For larger projects that need to plugin to the legacy code base,
| which I'll need to maintain for years, I still prefer to do
| things myself, using AI here and there as previously mentioned to
| help with little things. It can also help finding bugs more
| quickly (no more spending hours looking for a comma).
|
| I had an agent refactor something I was making for a larger
| project. It did it, and it worked, but it didn't write it in a
| way that made sense to my brain. I think others on my team would
| have also had trouble supporting it too. It took something
| relatively simple and added so many layers to it that it was hard
| to keep all the context in my head to make simple edits or
| explain to someone else how it worked. I might borrow some of the
| ideas it had, but will ultimately write my own solution that I
| think will be easier for other people to read and maintain.
|
| Borrowing some of these ideas and doing it myself also allows me
| to continue to learn and grow, so I have more tools in my tool
| belt. With the DNS thing that was totally vibe coded, there were
| some new things in there I hadn't done before. While the code
| made sense when I skimmed through it, I didn't learn anything
| from that effort. I couldn't do anything it did again without
| asking AI to do it again. Long-term, I think this would be a
| problem.
|
| Other people on my team have been using AI to write their docs.
| This has been awful. Usually they don't write anything at all,
| but at least then I know they didn't writing anything. The AI
| docs are simply wrong, 100% hallucinations. I have to waste time
| checking the doc against the code to figure that out and then go
| to the person that did it to make them fix it. Sometimes no doc
| is better than a bad doc.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| As a veteran freelance developer - aside from some occasional big
| wins, I'd say it's been net neutral or even net negative to my
| productivity. When I review AI-generated code carefully (and if
| I'm delivering it to clients I feel that's my responsibility) I
| always find unnecessary complexity, conceptual errors,
| performance issues, looming maintainability problems, etc. If I
| were to let it run free, these would just compound.
|
| A couple "win" examples: add in-text links to every term in this
| paragraph that appears elsewhere on the page, plus corresponding
| anchors in the relevant page parts. Or, replace any static text
| on this page with any corresponding dynamic elements from this
| reference URL.
|
| Lose examples: constant, but edit format glitches (not matching
| searched text; even the venerable Opus 4.6 constantly screws this
| up), unnecessary intermediate variables, ridiculously over-
| cautious exception-handling, failing to see opportunities to
| isolate repeated code into a function, or to utilize an existing
| function that exactly implements said N lines of code, etc.
| slurpyb wrote:
| It can only result in more work if you freelance because it you
| disclose that you used llm's then you did it faster than usual
| and presumably less quality so you have to deliver more to
| retain the same income except now your paying all the providers
| for all the models because you start hitting usage limits and
| claude sucks on the weekends and your drive is full of
| 'artifacts', which incurs mental overhead that is exacerbated
| by your crippling adhd
|
| And then all of a sudden you're just arguing with the terminal
| all day - the specs are written by gpt, delivered in-the email
| written by gpt. Sometimes they dont even have the time to slice
| their prompt from the edges of the paste but the only thing i
| can think of is "i need to make the most of 0.5x off peak
| claude rates "
|
| Fuck.
|
| I got lots of pretty TUIs though so thats neat
| simonw wrote:
| The majority of code I've written since November 2025 has been
| created using agents, as opposed to me typing code into a text
| editor. More than half of that has been done from my iPhone via
| Claude Code for web (bad name, great software.)
|
| I'm enjoying myself _so much_. Projects I 've been thinking about
| for years are now a couple of hours of hacking around. I'm
| readjusting my mental model of what's possible as a single
| developer. And I'm finally learning Go!
|
| The biggest challenge right now is keeping up with the review
| workload. For low stakes projects (small single-purpose HTML+JS
| tools for example) I'm comfortable not reviewing the code, but if
| it's software I plan to have other people use I'm not willing to
| take that risk. I have a stack of neat prototypes and maybe-
| production-quality features that I can't ship yet because I've
| not done that review work.
|
| I mainly work as an individual or with one other person - I'm not
| working as part of a larger team.
| Cyphase wrote:
| How often do you find issues during review? What kinds of
| issues?
| simonw wrote:
| Usually it's specification mistakes - I spot cases I hadn't
| thought to cover, or the software not behaving as usefully as
| if I had made a different design decision.
|
| Occasionally I'll catch things it didn't implement at all, or
| find things like missing permission checks.
| dondraper36 wrote:
| It's a fantastic performance booster for a lot of mundane tasks
| like writing and revising design docs, tests, debugging (using it
| like a super smart and active rubber duck), and system design
| discussions.
|
| I also use it as a final check on all my manually written code
| before sending it for code review.
|
| With all that said, I have this weird feeling that my ability to
| quickly understand and write code is no longer noticeable, nor
| necessary.
|
| Everyone now ships tons of code and even if I do the same without
| any LLM, the default perception will be that it has been
| generated.
|
| I am not depressed about it yet, but it will surely take a while
| to embrace the new reality in its entirety
| parpfish wrote:
| For debugging, it's also great trawling through logs and stack
| traces.
|
| Makes a late night oncall page way easier when the bot will
| tell you exactly what broke
| fantasizr wrote:
| I still like using it for quick references and autocomplete,
| boilerplate function. It's funny that text completion with tab is
| now seen as totally obsolete to some folks.
| morkalork wrote:
| More work, shorter deadlines, smaller headcount, higher
| expectations in terms of adaptability/transferability of people
| between projects (who needs knowledge transfer, ask the AI!).
|
| But in the end, the thing that pisses me off was a manager who
| used it to write tickets. If the product owner doesn't give a
| shit about the product enough to think and write about what they
| want, you'll never be successful as a developer.
|
| Otherwise it's pretty cool stuff.
| stainlu wrote:
| The biggest win for me has been cross-stack context switching. I
| maintain services in TypeScript, Python, and some Go, and the
| cost of switching between them used to be brutal - remembering
| idioms, library APIs, error handling patterns. Now I describe
| what I need and get idiomatic code in whichever language I'm in.
| That alone probably saves me 30-40 minutes on a typical day.
|
| Where it consistently fails: anything involving the interaction
| between systems. If a bug spans a queue producer and its
| consumer, or the fix requires understanding how a frontend state
| change propagates through API calls to a cache invalidation - the
| model gives you a confident answer that addresses one layer and
| quietly ignores the rest. You end up debugging its fix instead of
| the original issue.
|
| My stack: Claude Code (Opus) for investigation and bug triage in
| a ~60k LOC codebase, Cursor for greenfield work. Dropped
| autocomplete entirely after a month - it interrupted my thinking
| more than it helped.
| __mp wrote:
| I enjoy Opus on personal projects. I don't even bother to check
| the code. Go/JavaScript/Typescript/CSS works very well for me.
| Swift not so much. I haven't tried C/C++ yet. Scala was Ok.
|
| Professionally I hardly use the tools for coding, since I'm in an
| architecture role and mostly write design docs and do reviews.
| And I write the occasional prototype.
|
| I have started building tools to integrate copilot (Opus) better
| with $CORP. This way I can ask it questions across confluence and
| github.
|
| Leveraging Claude for a project feels very addictive to me. I
| have to make a conscious effort to stop and I end up working on
| multiple projects at the same time.
| cloud8421 wrote:
| At $WORK, my team is relatively small (< 10 people) and a few
| people really invested in getting the codebase (a large Elixir
| application with > 3000 modules) in shape for AI-assisted
| development with a very comprehensive set of skills, and some
| additional tooling.
|
| It works really well (using Claude Code and Opus 4.6 primarily).
| Incremental changes tend to be well done and mostly one-shotted
| provided I use plan mode first, and larger changes are achievable
| by careful planning with split phases.
|
| We have skills that map to different team roles, and 5 different
| skills used for code review. This usually gets you 90% there
| before opening a PR.
|
| Adopting the tool made me more ambitious, in the sense that it
| lets me try approaches I would normally discard because of gaps
| in my knowledge and expertise. This doesn't mean blindly
| offloading work, but rather isolating parts where I can
| confidently assess risk, and then proceed with radically
| different implementations guided by metrics. For example, we
| needed to have a way to extract redlines from PDF documents, and
| in a couple of days went from a prototype with embedded Python to
| an embedded Rust version with a robust test oracle against
| hundreds of document.
|
| I don't have multiple agents running at the same time working on
| different worktrees, as I find that distracting. When the agent
| is implementing I usually still think about the problem at hand
| and consider other angles that end up in subsequent revisions.
|
| Other things I've tried which work well: share an Obsidian note
| with the agent, and collaboratively iterate on it while working
| on a bug investigation.
|
| I still write a percentage of code by hand when I need to clearly
| visualise the implementation in my head (e.g. if I'm working on
| some algo improvement), or if the agent loses its way halfway
| through because they're just spitballing ideas without much
| grounding (rare occurrence).
|
| I find Elixir very well suited for AI-assisted development
| because it's a relatively small language with strong idioms.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This exactly matches our findings: if we start molding the repo
| to be "AI native" whatever that means, add the right tooling
| and still demand all engineers take full responsibility for
| their output, this system is a true multiplier.
|
| I also have Copilot and Cursor bugbot reviews and run it on a
| Ralph wiggum loop with claude code. A few rounds overnight and
| the PR is perfect and ready for a final review before merging.
|
| I do run 4 CC sessions in parallel though, but thats just one
| day a week. The rest of the week is spent figuring out the next
| set of features and fixes needed, operational things,
| meetings,feedback, etc.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| It solves no actual problem I have. Yet introduces many new ones.
| Its a trap. So I don't use it and have a strong policy against
| using it or allowing others to use it on things I work on. BATNA
| is key.
| fleventynine wrote:
| At the end of the day, I'm being paid to ensure that the code
| deployed to production meets a particular bar of quality.
| Regardless of whether I'm reviewing code or writing it, If I let
| a commit be merged, I have to be convinced that it is a net
| positive to the codebase.
|
| People having easy access to LLMs makes this job much harder.
| LLMs can create what looks at the surface like expert-written
| code, but suffers from below-the-surface issues that will reveal
| themselves as intermittent issues or subtle bugs after being
| deployed.
|
| Inexperienced devs create huge commits full of such code, and
| then expect me to waste an entire day searching for such issues,
| which is miserable.
|
| If the models don't improve significantly in the future, I expect
| that most high-stakes software teams will fire all the
| inexperienced devs and have super-experienced engineers work with
| the bots directly.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm transitioning from AI assisted (human in the loop) to AI
| driven (human on the loop) development. But my problems are
| pretty niche, I'm doing analytics right now where AI-driven is
| much more accessible. I'm in a team of three but so far I'm the
| only one doing the AI driven stuff. It basically means focusing
| on your specification since you are handing development off to
| the AI afterwards (and then a review of functionality/test
| coverage before deploying).
|
| Mostly using Gemini Flash 3 at a FAANG.
| ruduhudi wrote:
| I have the freedom to work with AI tools as much as I as I want
| and kind of lead the team in the direction I see fit.
|
| It's a lot of fun for exploring ideas. I've built things very
| fast that I would not have done at all otherwise. I have
| rewritten a huge chunk of semi-outdated docs into something
| useful with a couple of Prompts in a day. Claude does all the
| annoying dependency update breaks the build kinds of things. And
| the reviews are extremely useful and a perfect combination with
| human review as they catch things extremely well that humans are
| bad at catching.
|
| But in the production codebase changes must be made with much
| more consideration. Claude tends to perform well ob some tasks
| but for other I end up wasting time because I just don't know up
| front how the feature must look so I cannot write a spec at the
| level of precision that claude needs and changing code manually
| is more efficient for this kind of discovery for me than dealing
| with large chunks of constantly changing code.
|
| And then there's the fact that claude produces things that work
| and do the thing described in the prompt extremely well but they
| are always also wring in sone way. When I let AI build a large
| chunk of code and actually go through the code there's always a
| mess somewhere that ai review doesn't see because it looks
| completely plausible but contains some horrible security issue or
| complete inconsistency with the rest of the codebase or, you
| know, that custom yaml parser nobody asked for and that you don't
| want your day job to depend on.
| ruduhudi wrote:
| Oh good example
|
| Claude recently tried to replace a html sanitizer with a custom
| regex that perfectly fit all our tests as well as the spec I
| wrote
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Agreed, you often dig into what it built and find something
| insanely over engineered or something that doesn't match the
| "style" of your existing code.
| alexmuro wrote:
| AI has definitely shifted my work in a positive way, but I am
| still playing the same game.
|
| I run a small lab that does large data analytics and web products
| for a couple large clients. I have 5 developers who I manage
| directly, I write a lot of code myself and I interact directly
| with my clients. I have been a web developer for long enough to
| have written code in coldfusion, php, asp, asp.net, rails, node
| and javascript through microsoft frontpage exports, to jquery,to
| backbone, angular and react and in a lot of different frameworks.
| I feel this breadth of watching the internet develop in stages
| has given me a decent if imperfect understanding of many of the
| tradeoffs that can be made in developing for the web.
|
| My work lately is on an analytics / cms / data management / gis
| platform that is used by a couple of our clients and we've been
| developing for a couple of years before any ai was used on it
| all. Its a react front end built on react-router-7 that can be
| SPA or SSR and a node api server.
|
| I had tried AI coding a couple times over the past few years both
| for small toy projects and on my work and it felt to me less
| productive than writing code by hand until this January when I
| tried Claude Code with Opus 4.5. Since then I have written very
| few features by hand although I am often actively writing parts
| of them, or debugging by hand.
|
| I am maybe in a slightly unique place in that part of my job is
| coming up with tasks for other developers and making sure their
| code integrates back, I've been doing this for 10 years plus, and
| personally my sucess rate with getting someone to write a new
| feature that will get use is maybe a bit over 50%, that is maybe
| generous? Figuring out what to do next in a project that will
| create value for users is the hard part of my job whether I am
| delegating to developers or to an AI and that hasn't changed.
|
| That being said I can move through things significantly faster
| and more consistently using AI, and get them out to clients for
| testing to see if they are going to work. Its also been great for
| tasks which I know my developers will groan if I assign to them.
| In the last couple months I've been able to
|
| - create a new version of our server that is free from years of
| cruft of the monorepo api we use across all our projects. -
| implement sqlite compatablity for the server (in addition to
| original postgres support) - Implement local first sync from
| scratch for the project - Test out a large number of optimization
| strategies, not all of which worked out but which would have
| taken me so much longer and been so much more onerous the cost
| benefit ratio of engaging them would have been not worth it -
| Tons of small features I would have assigned to someone else but
| are now less effort to just have the AI implement.
| I think the biggest plus though is the amount of documentation
| that has accrued in our repo since using starting to use these
| tools. I find AI is pretty great at summarizing different
| sections of the code and with a little bit of conversation I can
| get it more or less exactly how I want it. This has been hugely
| useful to me on a number of occasions and something I would have
| always liked to have been doing but on a small team that is
| always under pressure to create results for our clients its
| something that didn't cross the immediate threshold of the cost
| benefit ratio.
|
| In my own use of AI, I keep the bottleneck at my own
| understanding of the code, its important to me that I maintain a
| thorough understanding of the codebase. I couple possibly go
| faster by giving it a longer leash, but that trade off doesn't
| seem wise to me at this point, first because I'm already moving
| so much faster than I was very recently and secondly because it
| doesn't seem very far from the next bottleneck which is deciding
| what is the next useful thing to implement. For the most part, I
| find the AI has me moving in the right direction almost all the
| time but I think this is partly for me because I am already
| practiced in communicating the programmers what to implement next
| and I have a deep understanding of the code base, but also
| because I spend more than half of the time using AI adding
| context, plans and documentation to the repo.
|
| I have encouraged my team to use these tools but I am not forcing
| it down anyone's throat, although its interesting to give people
| tasks that I am confident I could finish much quicker and much
| more to my personal taste than assigning it. The reactions from
| my team are pretty mixed, one of the strongest contributors
| doesn't find a lot of gains from it. One has found similar
| productivity gains to myself, others are very against it and hate
| it.
|
| I think one of the things it will change for me is, I can no
| longer just create the stories for everyone, learning how to
| choose on what to work on is going to be the most important skill
| in my opinion so over the next couple months I am going to be
| shifting so everyone on my team has direct client interactions
| and I am going to try to shift away from writing stories to
| having meetings where I help them decide on their own what to
| work on. Still part of the reason that I can afford to do this is
| because I can now get as much or more work done than I was able
| to with my whole team at this time last year.
|
| That's a big difference in one way, and I am optimistic that the
| platform I am working on will be a lot better and able to compete
| with large legacy platforms that it wouldn't have been able to
| compete with in the past, but still it just tightens the loop of
| trying new things and getting feedback and the hardest part of
| the business is still communication with clients and building
| relationships that create value.
| synthc wrote:
| Very hit or miss.
|
| Stack: go, python Team size: 8 Experience, mixed.
|
| I'm using a code review agent which sometimes catches a critical
| big humans miss, so that is very useful.
|
| Using it to get to know a code base is also very useful. A
| question like 'which functions touch this table' or 'describe the
| flow of this API endpoint' are usually answered correctly. This
| is a huge time saver when I need to work on a code base i'm less
| familiar with.
|
| For coding, agents are fine for simple straightforward tasks, but
| I find the tools are very myopic: they prefer very local changes
| (adding new helper functions all over the place, even when such
| helpers already exist)
|
| For harder problems I find agents get stuck in loops, and coming
| up with the right prompts and guardrails can be slower than just
| writing the code.
|
| I also hates how slow and unpredictable the agents can be. At
| times it feels like gambling. Will the agents actually fix my
| tests, or fuck up the code base? Who knows, let's check in 5
| minutes.
|
| IMO the worst thing is that juniors can now come up with large
| change sets, that seem good at a glance but then turn out to be
| fundamentally flawed, and it takes tons of time to review
| vcryan wrote:
| Love it. I can create closer to the speed of decision making.
| lnrd wrote:
| I work at a unicorn in EU. Claude Code has been rolled out to all
| of engineering with strict cost control policies, even with these
| in place we burn through tens of thousands of euro per months
| that I think could translate in 15/20 hires easily. Are we more
| productive than adding people to the headcount? That's a good
| question that I cannot answer.
|
| Some senior people that were in the AI pilot, have been using
| this for a while, and are very into it claimed that it can open
| PRs autonomously with minimum input or supervision (with a ton of
| MD files and skills in repos with clear architecture standards).
| I couldn't replicate this yet.
|
| I'm objectively happy to have access to this tool, it feels like
| a cheat code sometimes. I can research things in the codebase so
| fast, or update tests and glue code so quickly that my life is
| objectively better. If the change is small or a simple bugfix it
| can truly do it autonomously quicker than me. It does make me
| lazier though, sometimes it's just easier to fire up claude than
| to focus and do it by myself.
|
| I'm careful to not overuse it mostly to not reach the montlhy
| cap, so that I can "keep it" if something urgent or complex comes
| my way. Also I still like to do things by hand just because I
| still want to learn and maintain my skills. I feel that I'm not
| learning anything by using claude, that's a real thing.
|
| In the end I feel it's a powerful tool that is here to stay and I
| would be upset if I wouldn't have access to it anymore, it's very
| good. I recently subscribed to it and use it on my free time just
| because it's a very fun technology to play with. But it's a tool.
| I'm paid because I take responsability that my work will be
| delivered on time, working, tested, with code on par with the org
| quality standards. If I do it by hand or with claude is
| irrelevant. If i can do it faster it will likely mean I will
| receive more work to do. Somebody still has to operate Claude and
| it's not going to be non-technical people for sure.
|
| I genuinely think that if anyone still believes today that this
| technology is only hype or a slop machine, they are in denial or
| haven't tried to use a recent frontier model with the correct
| setup (mostly giving the agent a way to autonomously validate
| it's changes).
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Why did your company get claude code with token billing instead
| of getting everyone max plans ?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not that guy, but here token billing was chosen to get the
| Enterprise monitoring shit. I think the C-suite is expected
| to report productivity increases and needs all of the data
| that Anthropic can scrape to justify how much money is being
| on fire right now.
| lnrd wrote:
| I think they need to have the enterprise plan for accessing
| advanced security and data handling guarantees. Also they set
| up pretty strict controls on what tools the agents can use at
| the org level that we cannot override, not sure that's an
| option with the subscription plans.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I've been working on a client server unity based game the last
| couple of years. It's pretty bad at handling that use case. It
| misses tons of corner cases that span the client server divide.
| ugh123 wrote:
| When you prompt does the agent have access/visibility to all
| code bases/repos at once and do you prompt it to update both at
| the same time? That has worked well for me for client/server
| stuff.
| spprashant wrote:
| I only just started using it at work in the last month.
|
| I am a data engineer maintaining a big data Spark cluster as well
| as a dozen Postgres instances - all self hosted.
|
| I must confess it has made me extremely productive if we measure
| in terms of writing code. I don't even do a lot of special
| AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md shenanigans, I just prompt CC, work on a
| plan, and then manually review the changes as it implements it.
|
| Needless to say this process only works well because: A) I
| understand my code base. B) I have a mental structure of how I
| want to implement it.
|
| Hence it is easy to keep the model and me in sync about what's
| happening.
|
| For other aspects of my job I occasionally run questions by
| GPT/Gemini as a brainstorming partner, but it seems a lot less
| reliable. I only use it as a sounding board. I does not seem to
| make me any more effective at my job than simply reading
| documents or browsing github issues/stack overflow myself.
| aliljet wrote:
| As crazy as this seems, it's unlocking another variation of
| software engineering I didn't think was accessible. Previously,
| super entrenched and wicked expensive systems that might have
| taken years of engineering effort, appear to be ripe for
| disruption suddenly. The era of software systems with deeply
| engineered connectivity seem to be on the outs...
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| I am no longer in software as a day job so i am not sure of my
| input applys. I traded that world for opening a small brewery
| back in 2013. So I am a bit outdated on many modern trends but I
| still enjoy programming. In the last fee months using both gemeni
| and now movong over to claude, I have created at least 5 (and
| growing) small apps that have radically transformed what i am
| able to do at the business. I totally improved automation of my
| bookkeeping (~16hrs a month categorizing everything down to
| 3ish), created an immense amount of better reports on production,
| sales and predictions from a system i had already been slowly
| writing all these years, I created a run club rewards tracking
| app instead of relying on our paper method, improved upon a
| previously written full tv menu display system that syncs with
| our website and on premis tvs and now i am working on a full
| productive maintenance trigger system and a personal phone app to
| trigger each of these more easily. Its been a game changer for
| me. I have so many more ideas planned and each one frees up more
| of my waste time to create more.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I wrote a blog post over the New Year's of my experience at a
| company where AI coding was widely used and developer skill
| wasn't particularly high.
|
| https://burakku.com/blog/tired-of-ai-coders/
|
| I think the addendum to that is that I've since left.
| turlockmike wrote:
| I stopped writing code a year ago. Claude code is a multiplier
| when you know how to use it.
|
| Treat it like an intern, give it feedback, have it build skills,
| review every session, make it do unit tests. Red green refactor.
| Spend time up front reviewing the plan. Clearly communicate your
| intent and outcomes you want. If you say "do x" it has to guess
| what you want. If you say "I want this behaviour and this
| behaviour, 100% branch unit tested, adhearing to contributing
| guidelines and best practices, etc" it will take a few minutes
| longer, but the quality increases significantly.
|
| I uninstalled vscode, I built my own dashboard instead that
| organizes my work. I get instant notifications and have a pr
| review kick off a highly opinionated or review utilizing the
| Claude code team features.
|
| If you aren't doing this level of work by now, you will be
| automated soon. Software engineering is a mostly solved problem
| at this point, you need to embed your best practices in your
| agent and keep and eye on it and refine it over time.
| relativeadv wrote:
| Very cool. What have you built with this method? Do you mind
| sharing details about the kinds of projects?
| turlockmike wrote:
| I mostly do this for work. These days I'm mostly building
| tooling for other devs. Observable memory system for coding,
| PR automation, CLI apps, dev coding dashboard, email
| automation. All of it integrating AI at various points (where
| intelligence is useful). All of that in the last two months
| alone.
|
| Claude code skills represent a new type of AI native program.
| Give your agent the file system, let it build tools to sync
| and manage data.
| its-kostya wrote:
| > you need to embed your best practices in your agent and keep
| and eye on it and refine it over time.
|
| Sincere question, how do beginners to the field (interns,
| juniors) do this when they don't have any best practices yet?
| turlockmike wrote:
| My advice for juniors is that it's too late to get entry
| level jobs for software engineering, but AI Automation
| engineering is just starting. Get a Claude code sub and build
| whatever you can imagine and focus on improving your own
| coding agent. Automate one more thing every day.
| its-kostya wrote:
| Software eng has always been automating repetitive decision
| making and processes. Code is just a series of steps
| computers/systems follow deterministically. Now we are
| automating the automation.
|
| I don't necessarily disagree with your advice, but
| goodness, I don't look forward to using any of the low
| quality software in the next decade. I hope the
| shareholders remain happy.
| baq wrote:
| it's the easiest as it's ever been to get started in a
| foreign code base: start up the agent and ask questions. more
| or less instant answers, basically zero confabulations
| nowadays.
|
| ...but since it's so easy to deliver stuff without actually
| knowing anything, learning means putting in the effort to
| resist temptation and use the agent as a teaching aid instead
| of an intern savant.
| csto12 wrote:
| I have read comments about this on X, here, and other places,
| yet I have ever seen there be proof this is an actual
| productivity boost.
|
| I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it making
| making subtle mistakes, all the time.
|
| Are you really being more productive (let's say 3x times more),
| or just feel that way because you are constantly prompting
| Claude?
|
| Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't buy it.
| wg0 wrote:
| I agree. The code despite detailed spec reveals bugs and edge
| cases upon inspection.
|
| I'm talking Claude Opus 4.6 here.
| dude250711 wrote:
| For all we know, some important clients might just be
| getting better service out of Anthropic's/OpenAI's "black
| boxes".
| cluckindan wrote:
| The spec needs to be explicit about edge and corner cases.
| baq wrote:
| typical experience when only using one foundational model
| TBH. results are much better if you let different models
| review each other.
|
| the bottleneck now is testing. that isn't going away anytime
| soon, it'll get much worse for a bit while models are good at
| churning code out that's slightly wrong or technically
| correct, but solving a different problem than intended; it's
| going to be a relatively short lived situation I'm afraid
| until the industry switches to most code being written for
| serving agents instead of humans.
| turlockmike wrote:
| The way LLMs work, different tokens can activate different
| parts of the network. I generally have 2-3 different agents
| review it from different perspectives. I give them
| identities, like Martin Fowler, or Uncle Bob, or whatever I
| think is relevant.
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| > I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it
| making making subtle mistakes, all the time.
|
| Didn't we make subtle mistakes without AI?
|
| Why did we spend so much time debugging and doing code
| reviews?
|
| > Are you really being more productive (let's say 3x times
| more)
|
| At least 2x more productive, and that's huge.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Are you getting paid 2x more?
| csto12 wrote:
| I think you've forgotten about the context of OP's post. He
| said he uninstalled vscode and uses a dashboard for
| managing his agents. How are you going to be able to do
| code review well when you don't even know what's going on
| in your own project? I catch subtle bugs Claude emits
| because I know exactly what's happening because I'm
| actively working with Claude, not letting Claude do
| everything.
| turlockmike wrote:
| The code is still visible if i want to review it.
|
| But since I have a strong rule about always writing unit
| tests before code, my confidence is a lot higher.
|
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-
| work/
| csto12 wrote:
| >The code is still visible if i want to review it.
|
| I agree that the test harness is the most important part,
| which is only possible to create successfully if you are
| very familiar with exactly how your code works and how it
| _should_ work. How would you reach this point using a
| dashboard and just reviewing PRs?
| cdelsolar wrote:
| i really don't understand why people keep thinking this. i'm
| easily 10x more productive since Claude Code came out. it's
| insane how much stuff you can build quickly, especially on
| personal projects.
| csto12 wrote:
| Of course personal projects are much quicker because
| usually personal projects don't have high code standards...
| I'm talking about production code.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why exactly do you think people not doing that kind of work
| will be automated but your kind of work won't be automated?
|
| If AI really is all that, then whatever "special" thing you are
| doing will be automated as well.
| turlockmike wrote:
| I don't disagree, aspects of that will be automated, but two
| things will remain: Intent and Judgement.
|
| Building AI systems will be about determining the right thing
| to build and ensuring your AI system fully understands it.
| For example, I have a trading bot that trades. I spent a lot
| of time on refining the optimization statement for the AI. If
| you give it the wrong goal or there's any ambiguity, it can
| go down the wrong path.
|
| On the back end, I then judge the outcomes. As an engineer I
| can understand if the work it did actually accomplished the
| outcomes I wanted. In the future it will be applying that
| judgement to every field out there.
| AstroBen wrote:
| You're trusting AI to trade with your real money?
| turlockmike wrote:
| Not a lot of money because I haven't built enough
| confidence but yes it's the ultimate test of can it do
| economically useful work
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I mean, real algo trading shops use "AI" to do it all the
| time, they just don't use LLMs. While I'm not the GP I
| think the idea they're trying to express is that the nuts
| and bolts of structuring programs is going away. The
| engineer of today, according to this claim and similar to
| Karpathy's Software 3.0 idea, structures their work in
| terms of blocks of intelligence and uses these blocks to
| construct programs. Nothing stopping Claude Code or
| another LLM coding harness from generating the
| scaffolding for a time-series model and then letting the
| author refactor the model and its hyperparameters as
| needed to achieve fit.
|
| Though I don't know of any algo trading shop that relies
| purely on algorithms as market regimes change frequently
| and the alpha of new edge ends up getting competed away
| frequently.
|
| (And personally I'm a believer of the jagged intelligence
| theory of LLMs where there's some tasks that LLMs are
| great at and other tasks that they'll continue being
| idiotic at for a while, and think there's plenty of work
| left for nuts and bolts program writers to do.)
| turlockmike wrote:
| My trading agent builds its own models, does backtesting,
| builds tools for real time analysis and trading. I wrote
| zero of the code, i haven't even seen the code. The only
| thing I make sure is that it's continuously self
| improving (since I haven't been able to figure out how to
| automate that yet).
| tehjoker wrote:
| Another way of saying this is most line engineers will be
| moving into management, but managing AIs instead of people.
| headcanon wrote:
| Thats exactly what we as software engineers do. We are
| constantly automating ourselves out of a job. The trick is
| that we never actually accomplish that, there will always be
| things for humans to do.
|
| We're discovering so much latent demand for software, Jevon's
| paradox is in full effect and we're working more than ever
| _with_ AI (at least I am).
| turlockmike wrote:
| Software engineering is being automated. But building
| intelligent automation is just starting. AI engineer will
| be the only job left in the future as long as there are
| things to automate. It's really all the other jobs that
| will be automated first before AI engineer.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I see variations of this non-stop these days, people who seem
| to be sure AI is going to automate everything _right up_ to
| them.
| sofixa wrote:
| Sounds like tech debt as a service. If the code review is
| automated, how can you be sure the code isn't full of security
| or maintanability issues?
| turlockmike wrote:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > If you aren't doing this level of work by now, you will be
| automated soon.
|
| It's harder and harder to detect sarcasm these days but in case
| you're being serious, I've tested a similar setup and I noticed
| Claude produces perfectly plausible code that has very subtle
| bugs that get harder and harder to notice. In the end, the
| initial speedup was gone and I decided to rewrite everything by
| hand. I'm working on a product where we need to understand the
| code base very well.
| rckclmbr wrote:
| I keep hearing "Claude creates subtle bugs", but how is that
| different than people engineers? I've never worked in a bug
| free codebase
| eeperson wrote:
| Everybody produces bugs, but Claude is good a producing
| code that looks like it solves the problem but doesn't.
| Developers worth working with, grow out of this in a new
| project. Claude doesn't.
|
| An example I have of this is when I asked Claude to copy a
| some functionality from a front-end application to a back-
| end application. It got all of the function signatures
| right but then hallucinated the contents of the functions.
| Part of this functionality included a look up map for some
| values. The new version had entirely hallucinated keys and
| values, but the values sounded correct if you didn't
| compare with the original. A human would have literally
| copied the original lookup map.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I asked claude to help me figure out some statistical
| calculation in Apple Numbers. It helpfully provided the
| results of the calculation. I ignored it and implemented
| it in the spreadsheet and got completely different
| (correct) results. Claude did help me figure out how to
| do it correctly though!
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| > Developers worth working with, grow out of this in a
| new project. Claude doesn't.
|
| There is no way this is true. People make fewer bugs with
| time and guidance, but no human makes zero bugs. Also,
| bugs are not planned; it's always easy to in hindsight
| say "A human would have literally copied the original
| lookup map," but every bug has some sort of mistake that
| is made that is off the status quo. That's why it's a
| bug.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| When you write the code yourself you are slowly building up
| a mental model of how said thing should work. If you end up
| introducing a subtle bug during that process, at least you
| already have a good understanding of the code, so it
| shouldn't be much of an issue to work backwards to find out
| what assumptions turned out to be incorrect.
|
| But now with Claude, the mental model of how your code
| works is not in your head, but resides behind a chain of
| reasoning from Claude Code that you are not privy too. When
| something breaks, you either have to spend much longer
| trying to piece together what your agent has made, or to
| continue throwing Claude at and hope it doesn't spiral into
| more subtle bugs.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| > Software engineering is a mostly solved problem at this point
|
| I guess that's why Claude Code has 0 open issues on Github.
| Since software engineering is solved, their autonomous agents
| can easily fix their own software much better and faster than
| human devs. They can just add "make no mistakes" to their
| prompt and the model can solve any problem!
|
| Oh wait, they have 5,000+ open issues on Github[1]. I'm yet to
| be convinced that this is a solved problem
|
| [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues
| wg0 wrote:
| The OP probably is the only person in their team. There's no
| other plausible explanation of this level of AI psychosis.
|
| PS: All in for AI agents I use all the time but sorry - SE is
| not a solved problem. Yet.
| turlockmike wrote:
| We have 80 engineers.
| devmor wrote:
| Do you have any kind of proof you can show us? This reads like
| every other AI hype post but I have still never seen anyone
| demonstrate anything but proof of concept apps and imaginary
| workloads.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| yeah, you'd think these commercial organizations would sit
| down with like, one marketer, and just put a non-trivial app
| together in real time and screen cap it all...
|
| like, we've had this technology for several decades now, and
| none of these AI tools are like: "This is so great, let me
| show everyone how to write a CRUD database with a notepad and
| calendar app" or whatever.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It looks like he has created a handful of very simple
| utilities, which isn't surprising. LLMs are great for that.
|
| https://github.com/turlockmike
| queenkjuul wrote:
| I'm sure they don't
| analog31 wrote:
| >>>> Software engineering is a mostly solved problem at this
| point...
|
| I'll believe it when AI can tell me when a project will be
| done. I've asked my developer friends about this and I get a
| blank stare,like I'm stupid for asking.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| >Software engineering is a mostly solved problem at this point
|
| You from 2 months ago:
|
| >LLMs are great coders, but subpar developers".
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434304
|
| Interesting. That's a lot of progress in 2 months!
| tonymet wrote:
| AI has helped me break through procrastination by taking care of
| tedious tasks that beforehand had a low ROI (boilerplate, CI/CD
| configs, test coverage, shell scripting/automation).
|
| - create unit tests and benchmark tests that required lots of
| boiler plate , fixtures
|
| - add CI / CD to a few projects that I didn't have motivation to
|
| - freshen up old projects to modern standards (testing, CI / CD,
| update deps, migrations/deprecations)
|
| - add monitoring / alerting to 2 projects that I had been
| neglecting. One was a custom DNS config uptime monitor.
|
| - automated backup tools along with scripts for verifying
| recovery procedure.
|
| - moderate migrations for deprecated APIs and refactors within
| cli and REST API services
|
| - auditing GCP project resources for billing and security
| breaches
|
| - frontend, backend and offline tiers for cloud storage
| management app
| HorizonXP wrote:
| I am having the greatest time professionally with AI coding. I
| now have the engineering team I've always dreamed of. In the last
| 2 months I have created:
|
| - a web-based app for a F500 client for a workflow they've been
| trying to build for 2 years; won the contract
|
| - built an iPad app for same client for their sales teams to use
|
| - built the engineering agent platform that I'm going to raise
| funding
|
| - a side project to do rough cuts of family travel videos
| (https://usefirstcut.com, soft launch video:
| https://x.com/xitijpatel/status/2026025051573686429)
|
| I see a lot of people in this thread struggling with AI coding at
| work. I think my platform is going to save you. The existing
| tools don't work anymore, we need to think differently. That
| said, the old engineering principles still work; heck, they work
| even better now.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > - a side project to do rough cuts of family travel videos
| (https://usefirstcut.com, soft launch video:
| https://x.com/xitijpatel/status/2026025051573686429)
|
| I can't comment about the quality of the code you delivered for
| your client so I checked your side project. Unfortunately it
| looks like there is only a landing page (very nice!) but the
| way from a vibe-coded project to production is usually quite
| long.
| HorizonXP wrote:
| Not wrong at all, that's why I'm building my own platform for
| this. That's also why I haven't publicly done much on First
| Cut yet. I'm using my platform to actually build the product,
| so the intent is that I use my expertise and oversight to
| ensure it's not just slop code. So most of the effort has
| gone into building that platform, which has made building
| First Cut itself slower. But I've actually got my platform
| running well-enough that now my team is able to get involved,
| and I can start to work on First Cut again, which means that
| I should be able to answer your "concern" definitively. I
| share it.
| cedws wrote:
| For my job which is mostly YAML engineering with some light Go
| coding (Platform) I'm finding it useful. We're DRY-ing out a
| bunch of YAML with CUE at the moment and it's sped up that work
| up tremendously.
|
| When it comes to personal projects I'm feeling extremely
| unmotivated. Things feel more in reach and I've probably built
| ten times the number of throwaway projects in the past year than
| I have in previous years. Yet I feel no inspiration to see those
| projects through to the end. I feel no connection to them because
| _I_ didn 't build them. I have a feeling of 'what's the point'
| publishing these projects when the same code is only a few
| prompts away for someone else too. And publishing them under my
| name only cheapens the rest of my work which I put real cognitive
| effort into.
|
| I think I want to focus more on developing knowledge and skills
| moving forward. Whatever I can produce with an LLM in a few hours
| is not actually valuable unless I'm providing some special
| insight, and I think I'm coming to terms with that at the moment.
| transmit101 wrote:
| > Yet I feel no inspiration to see those projects through to
| the end. I feel no connection to them because I didn't build
| them
|
| For me, this is a key differentiator between "AI-assisted" and
| "vibe-coded". With the former, I may use AI in many ways: some
| code generation, review, bouncing ideas, or whatever. But I
| engage in every step, review and improve the generated code,
| disagree with the reviews (and still contribute a good
| proportion of hand-written code, at least in the core business
| logic). In this way I retain sufficient ownership over the
| output to feel it is my own.
|
| With vibe-coding, I feel exactly as you describe it.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| What in the world is YAML engineering?
| spicyusername wrote:
| Originally my workflow was:
|
| - Think about requirement
|
| - Spend 0-360 minutes looking through the code
|
| - Start writing code
|
| - Realize I didn't think about it quite enough and fix the design
|
| - Finish writing code
|
| - Write unit tests
|
| - Submit MR
|
| - Fix MR feedback
|
| Until recently no LLM was able to properly disrupt that, however
| the release of Opus 4.5 changed that.
|
| Now my workflow is:
|
| - Throw as much context into Opus as possible about what I want
| in plan mode
|
| - Spend 0-60 minutes refining the plan
|
| - Have Opus do the implementation
|
| - Review all the code and nitpick small things
|
| - Submit MR
|
| - Implement MR feedback
| avadodin wrote:
| Odd how you add the time for the requirement analysis but none
| for the coding.
|
| Then you tell us you leave 83% of the analysis --and the
| coding-- to a code chatbot.
|
| Are you actually more productive or are you going to find out
| down the line the chatbot missed some requirements and made
| APIs up to fill up a downstream document and now you better
| support them by yesterday?
|
| In ye olden days, people doing this would scream at the junior
| developers. Are you going to scream at your screen?
| throwawayFanta wrote:
| At my FAANG, there was a team of experienced engineers that
| proved they could deliver faster and more performant code than a
| complete org that was responsible for it earlier.
|
| So now a lot of different parts of the company are trying to
| replicate their workflow. The process is showing what works, you
| need to have AI first documentation (readme with one line for
| each file to help manage context), develop skills and steering
| docs for your codebase, code style, etc,. And it mostly works!
|
| For me personally, it has drastically increased productivity. I
| can pick up something from our infinitely huge backlog, provide
| some context and let the agent go ham on fixing it while i do
| whatever other stuff is assigned to me.
| its-kostya wrote:
| The output the agent creates falls into one of these categories:
|
| 1. Correct, maintainable changes 2. Correct, not maintable
| changes 3. Correct diff, maintains expected system interaction 4.
| Correct diff, breaks system interaction.
|
| In no way are they consistent or deterministic but _always_
| convincing they are correct.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| Somewhat against the common sentiment, I find it's very helpful
| on a large legacy project. At work, our main product is a very
| old, very large code base. This means it's difficult to build up
| a good understanding of it -- documentation is often out of date,
| or makes assumptions about prior knowledge. Tracking down the
| team or teams that can help requires being very skilled at
| navigating a large corporate hierarchy. But at the end of the
| day, the answers for how the code works is mostly in the code
| itself, and this is where AI assistance has really been shining
| for me. It can explore the code base and find and explain
| patterns and available methods far faster than I can.
|
| My prompts end to be in the pattern of "I am looking to implement
| <X>. <Detailed description of what I expect X to do.>. Review the
| code base to find similar examples of how this is currently done,
| and propose a plan for how to implement this."
|
| These days I'm on Claude Code, and I do that first part in Plan
| mode, though even a few months ago on earlier, not-as-performant
| models and tools, I was still finding value with this approach.
| It's just getting better, as the company is investing in shared
| skills/tools/plugins/whatever the current terminology is that is
| specific to various use cases within the code base.
|
| I haven't been writing so much code directly, but I do still very
| much feel that this is my code. My sessions are very interactive
| -- I ask the agent to explain decisions, question its plans,
| review the produced code and often revise it. I find it frees me
| up to spend more time thinking through and having higher level
| architecture applied instead of spending frustrating hours
| hunting down more basic "how does this work" information.
|
| I think it might have been an article by Simon Willison that made
| the case for there being a way to use AI tooling to make you
| smarter, or to make you dumber. Point and shoot and blindly
| accept output makes you dumber -- it places more distance between
| you and your code base. Using AI tools to automate away a lot of
| the toil give you energy and time to dive deeper into your code
| base and develop a stronger mental model of how it works -- it
| makes you smarter. I keep in mind that at the end of the day,
| it's my name on the PR, regardless of how much Claude directly
| created or edited the files.
| michelb wrote:
| I'm not a professional developer but I can find my way around
| several languages and deployment systems. I have used Claude to
| migrate a mediumsized Laravel 5 app to Laravel 11 in about 2-3
| days. I would not have dared to touch it otherwise.
|
| In my day job I'm currently a PM/operations director at a small
| company. We don't have programmers. I have used AI to build about
| 12 internal tools in the past year. They're not very big, but
| provide huge productivity gains. And although I do not fully
| understand the codebase, I know what is where. Three of these
| tools I'm now recreating based on our usage and learnings.
|
| I have learned a ton about all kinds of development concepts in a
| ridiculously short timeframe.
| zmj wrote:
| It's great. I'd guess 80-90% of my code is produced in Copilot
| CLI sessions since the beginning of the year. Copilot CLI is
| worse than Claude Code, but not by a huge amount. This is mostly
| working in established 100k+ LOC codebases in C# and TypeScript,
| with a couple greenfield new projects. I have to write more code
| by hand in the greenfield projects at their formative stage; LLMs
| do better following conventions in an existing codebase than
| being consistent in a new one.
|
| Important things I've figured out along the way:
|
| 1. Enable the agent to debug and iterate. Whatever you'd do to
| test and verify after you write your first pass at an
| implementation, figure out a way for an agent to do it too. For
| example: every API call is instrumented with OpenTelemetry, and
| the agent has a local collector to query.
|
| 2. Make scripts or skills to increase the reliability of fallible
| multi-step processes that need to be repeated often. For example:
| getting an oauth token to call some api with the appropriate user
| scopes for the task.
|
| 3. Continually revise your AGENTS.md. I'll often end a coding
| session by asking the agent whether there's anything from this
| session that should be captured there. That adds more than it
| removes, so every few days I'll compact it by having an agent
| reword the important stuff for conciseness and get rid anything
| obvious from implementation.
| fastasucan wrote:
| It makes my work suck, sadly. Team dynamics also contributes to
| that, admittedly.
|
| Last year I was working on implementing a pretty big feature in
| our codebase, it required a lot of focus to get the business
| logic right and at the same time you had be very creative to make
| this feasible to run without hogging to much resources.
|
| When I was nearly done and worked on catching bugs, team members
| grew tired of waiting and starting taking my code from x weeks
| ago (I have no idea why), feeding it to Claude or whatever and
| then came back with a solution. So instead of me finishing my
| code I had to go through their version of my code.
|
| Each one of the proposals had one or more business requirements
| wrong and several huge bugs. Not one was any closer to a solution
| than mine was.
|
| I had appreciated any contribution to my code, but thinking that
| it would be so easy to just take my code and finishing it by
| asking Claude was rather insulting.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| There's a lot more going on there than AI ...
| rsoto2 wrote:
| Not really, this is exactly what I expect due to baseless
| lies from the AI companies and a disdain for employee payroll
| by the C-suite.
| foolserrandboy wrote:
| they fantasize about unpaid interns writing specs and
| nobody ever needed to look at the code in a few years
| tim-tday wrote:
| If someone does that simply say "no. use the latest code"
| boredemployee wrote:
| I completely understand.
|
| We're in a phase where founders are obsessed with productivity
| so everything seens to work just fine and as intended with few
| slops.
|
| They're racing to be as productive as possible so we can get
| who knows where.
|
| There are times when I honestly don't even know why we're
| automating certain tasks anymore.
|
| In the past, we had the option of saying we didn't know
| something, especially when it was an area we didn't want to
| know about. Today, we no longer have that option, because
| knowledge is just a prompt away. So you end up doing front-end
| work for a backend application you just built, even though your
| role was supposed to be completely different.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Today, we no longer have that option, because knowledge is
| just a prompt away
|
| Something resembling knowledge anyway. A sort of shambling
| mound wearing knowledge like a skinsuit
| boredemployee wrote:
| While I agree, I can't deny that AI is doing the job most
| of the time. But the hunt for the supreme productivity
| feels disgusting sometimes.
| peab wrote:
| This seems to be a team problem more than anything? Why are
| your coworkers taking on your responsibilities? Where's your
| manager on this?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Could be an emergent team problem that wouldn't have had
| cause to exist before AI.
| AdeptusAquinas wrote:
| Very much mixed. I've used Claude to generate small changes to an
| existing repo, asking it to create functions or react template in
| the style of the rest of the file its working in, and thats
| worked great. I still do a lot of the fine tuning there, but if
| the codebase isn't one I am overly familiar with this is a good
| way to ensure my work doesn't conflict with the core team's.
|
| I have also done the agentic thing and built a full CLI tool via
| back-and-forth engagement with Claude and that worked great - I
| didn't write a single line of code. Because the CLI tool was
| calling an API, I could ask Claude to run the requests it was
| generating and adjust based on the result - errors, bad requests
| etc, and it would fairly rapidly fix and coalesce on a working
| solution.
|
| After I was done though, I reckon that if instead of this I had
| just done the work myself I would have had a much smaller, more
| reliable project. Less error handling, no unit tests, no
| documentation sure, but it would have worked and worked better -
| I wouldn't need to iterate off the API responses because I would
| have started with a better contract-based approach. But all of
| that would have been hard, would have required more 'slow
| thinking'. So... I didn't really draw a clean conclusion from the
| effort.
|
| Continuing to experiment, not giving up on anything yet.
| jv22222 wrote:
| I feel bad saying this because so many folks have not had the
| best of luck, but it's changed the game for me.
|
| I'm building out large multi-repo features in a 60 repo
| microservice system for my day job. The AI is very good at
| exploring all the repos and creating plans that cut across them
| to build the new feature or service. I've built out legacy
| features and also completely new web systems, and also done
| refactoring. Most things I make involve 6-8 repos. Everything
| goes through code review and QA. Code being created is not slop.
| High quality code and passes reviews as such. Any pushback I get
| goes back in to the docs and next time round those mistakes
| aren't made.
|
| I did a demo of how I work in AI to the dev team at Math Academy
| who were complete skeptics before the call 2 hours later they
| were converts.
| wk_end wrote:
| Around a year ago I started a new position at a very large tech
| company that I won't name, working on a pre-existing web project
| there. The code base isn't terrible - though not very good
| either, by-and-large - but it's absolutely massive, often over-
| engineered, pretty unorthodox, and definitely has some
| questionable design decisions; even after more than a year of
| working with it I still feel like a beginner much of the time.
|
| This year I grudgingly bit the bullet and began using AI tools,
| and to my dismay they've been a pretty big boon for me, in this
| case. Not just for code generation - they're really good at
| probing the monolith and answering questions I have about how it
| works. Before I'd spend days pouring over code before starting
| work to figure out the right way to build something or where to
| break in, pinging people over in India or eastern Europe with
| questions and hoping they reply to me overnight. AI's totally
| replaced that, and it works shockingly well.
|
| When I do fall back on it for code generation, it's mostly just
| to mitigate the tedium of writing boilerplate. The code it
| produces tends to be pretty poor - both in terms of style and
| robustness - and I'll usually need to take at least a couple of
| passes over it to get it up to snuff. I do find this faster than
| writing everything out by hand in the end, but not by a lot.
|
| For my personal projects I don't find it adds much, but I do
| enjoy rubber ducking with ChatGPT.
| abcde666777 wrote:
| Using these tools for understanding seems to be one of the best
| use cases - lots of pros, less dangerous cons (worst case
| scenario is a misleading understanding, but that can be
| minimized by directly double checking the claims being made).
|
| In fact it looks like an arising theme is that whenever we use
| these tools it's valuable to maintain a human understanding of
| what's actually going on.
| sornaensis wrote:
| I have good success using Copilot to analyze problems for me, and
| I have used it in some narrow professional projects to do
| implementation. It's still a bit scary how off track the models
| can go without vigilance.
|
| I have a lot of worry that I will end up having to eventually
| trudge through AI generated nightmares since the major projects
| at work are implemented in Java and Typescript.
|
| I have very little confidence in the models' abilities to
| generate good code in these or most languages without a lot of
| oversight, and even less confidence in many people I see who are
| happy to hand over all control to them.
|
| In my personal projects, however, I have been able to get what
| feels like a huge amount of work done very quickly. I just treat
| the model as an abstracted keyboard-- telling it what to write,
| or more importantly, what to rewrite and build out, for me, while
| I revise the design plans or test things myself. It feels like a
| proper force multiplier.
|
| The main benefit is actually parallelizing the process of
| creating the code, NOT coming up with any ideas about how the
| code should be made or really any ideas at all. I instruct them
| like a real micro-manager giving very specific and narrow tasks
| all the time.
| devmor wrote:
| It's not really that useful for what people tell me it will be
| useful for, most of the time. For context, I am a senior engineer
| that works in fintech, mostly doing backend work on APIs and
| payment rail microservices.
|
| I find the most use from it as a search engine the same way I'd
| google "x problem stackoverflow".
|
| When I was first tasked with evaluating it for programming
| assistance, I thought it was a good "rubber duck" - but my
| opinion has since changed. I found that if I documented my goals
| and steps, using it as a rubber duck tended to lead me away from
| my goals rather than refine them.
|
| Outside of my role they can be a bit more useful and generally
| impressive when it comes to prompting small proof of concept
| applications or tools.
|
| My general take on the current state of LLMs for programming in
| my role is that they are like having a junior engineer that does
| not learn and has a severe memory disorder.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| 5 years ago, I set out to build an open-source, interoperable
| marketplace. It was very ambitious because it required me to
| build an open source Shopify for not only e-commerce, but
| restaurants, gyms, hotels, etc that this marketplace could tap
| into. Without AI, this vision would've faltered but with AI, this
| vision is in reach. I see so many takes about AI killing open-
| source but I truly think it will liberate us from proprietary
| SaaS and marketplaces given enough time.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Here's my anecdote: I use ChatGPT, Gemini (web chat UI) and
| Claude. Claude is a bit more convenient in that it has access to
| my code bases, but this comes at the cost of I have to be careful
| I'm steering it correctly, while with the chat bots, I can feed
| it only the correct context.
|
| They simplify discrete tasks. Feature additions, bug fixes,
| augmenting functionality.
|
| They are incapable of creating good quality (easily expandable
| etc) architecture or overall design, but that's OK. I write the
| structs, module layout etc, and let it work on one thing at a
| time. In the past few days, I've had it: - Add a
| ribbon/cartoon mesh creator - Fixed a logical vs physical
| pixel error on devices where they were different for positioning
| text, and setting window size - Fixed a bug with selecting
| things with the mouse under specific conditions - Fixing
| the BLE advertisement payload format when integrating with a
| service. - Inputting tax documents for stock sales from the
| PDF my broker gives me to the CSV format the tax software uses
|
| Overall, great tool! But I think a lot of people are lying about
| its capabilities.
| nzoschke wrote:
| It's going very well.
|
| Experience level: very senior, programming for 25 years, have
| managed platform teams at Heroku and Segment.
|
| Project type: new startup started Jan '26 at
| https://housecat.com. Pitch is "dev tools for non developers"
|
| Team size: currently 2.
|
| Stack: Go, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, Postgres, SQLite, GCP and
| exe.dev.
|
| Claude code and other coding harnesses fully replaced typing code
| in an IDE over the past year for me.
|
| I've tried so many tools. Cursor, Claude and Codex, open source
| coding agents, Conductor, building my own CLIs and online dev
| environments. Tool churn is a challenge but it pays dividends to
| keep trying things as there have been major step functions in
| productivity and multi tasking. I value the HN community for
| helping me discover and cut through the space.
|
| Multiple VMs available over with SSH with an LLM pre-configured
| has been the latest level up.
|
| Coding is still hard work designing tests, steering agents,
| reviewing code, and splitting up PRs. I still use every bit of my
| experience every day and feel tired at end of day.
|
| My non-programmer co-founder, more of a product manager and biz
| ops person, has challenges all the time. He generally can only
| write functional prototypes. We solve this by embracing the
| functional prototype and doing a lot of pair programming. It is
| much more productive than design docs or Figma wireframes.
|
| In general the game changer is how much a couple of people can
| get done. We're able to prototype ideas, build the real app,
| manage SOC2 infra, marketing and go to market better than ever
| thanks to the "willing interns" we have. I've done all this
| before and the AI helps with so much of the boilerplate and
| busywork.
|
| I'm looking for beta testers and security researchers for the
| product, as well as a full time engineer if anyone is interested
| in seeing what a "greenfield" product, engineering culture and
| business looks like in 2026. Contact info in my profile.
| mrmansano wrote:
| Interesting premise for your product. Hope you find success!
| From a dev perspective I feel your website pass a vibe more of
| a "OpenClaw you can trust" than "dev tool for non developers".
| Is that right? Or am I misreading the idea?
| Izkata wrote:
| I don't use it.
|
| I know my mind fairly well, and I know my style of laziness will
| result in atrophying skills. Better not to risk it.
|
| One of my co-workers already admitted as much to me around six
| months ago, and that he was trying not to use AI for any code
| generation anymore, but it was really difficult to stop because
| it was so easy to reach for. Sounded kind of like a drug
| addiction to me. And I had the impression he only felt
| comfortable admitting it to me because I don't make it a secret
| that I don't use it.
|
| Another co-worker did stop using it to generate code because (if
| I'm remembering right) he can tell what it generates is messy for
| long-term maintenance, even if it does work and even though he's
| new to React. He still uses it often for asking questions.
|
| A third (this one a junior) seemed to get dumber over the past
| year, opening merge request that didn't solve the problem. In a
| couple of these cases my manager mentioned either seeing him use
| AI while they were pairing (and it looked good enough so the
| problems just slipped by) or saw hints in the merge request with
| how AI names or structures the code.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I use AI to discuss and possibly generate ideas and tests, but
| I make sure I understand everything and type it in except for
| trivial stuff. The main value of an engineer is understanding
| things. AI can help me understand things better and faster. If
| I just setup plans for AI and vibe, human capital is neglected
| and declines. I don't think there's much of a future if you
| don't know what you're doing, but there is always a future for
| people with deep understanding of problems and systems.
| tim-tday wrote:
| I'm the same way. But I took a bite and now I'm hooked.
|
| I started using it for things I hate, ended up using it
| everywhere. I move 5x faster. I follow along most of the time.
| Twice a week I realize I've lost the thread. Once a month it
| sets me back a week or more.
| philipp-gayret wrote:
| 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 messy for long-term
| maintenance, even if it does work and even though he's new to
| React.
|
| When one can generate code in such a short amount of time,
| logically it is not hard to maintain. You could just re-
| generate it if you didn't like it. I don't believe this style
| of argument where it's easy to generate with AI but then you
| cannot maintain it after. It does not hold up logically, and I
| have yet to see such a codebase where AI was able to generate
| it, but now cannot maintain it. What I have seen this year is
| feature-complete language and framework rewrites done by AI
| with these new tools. For me the unmaintainable code claim is
| difficult to believe.
| wg0 wrote:
| I foresee that the AI blindness at CEO/CFO level and the general
| hype (from technical and non technical press and media) in our
| society that software engineering is over etc will result in
| severe talent shortage in 5-7 years resulting in bidding wars for
| talent driving salaries 3x upwards or more.
| shockwaverider wrote:
| One thing I use Claude for is diagramming system architecture
| stuff in LateX and it's great, I just describe what I am
| visualizing and kaboom I get perfect output I can paste into
| overleaf.
| crsl wrote:
| At work I mostly use claude code and chatgpt web for general
| queries, but cursor is probably the most popular in our company.
| I don't think we are "cooked" but it definitely changes how
| development will be done. I think the process of coming up with
| solutions will still be there but implementation is much faster
| now.
|
| My observations:
|
| 1. What works for me is the usual, work iteratively on a plan
| then implement and review. The more constraints I put into the
| plan the better.
|
| 2. The biggest problem for me is LLM assuming something wrong and
| then having to steer it back or redoing the plan.
|
| 3. Exploring and onboarding to new codebases is much faster.
|
| 4. I don't see the 10x speedup but I do see that now I can
| discard and prototype ideas quickly. For example I don't spend
| 20-30 minutes writing something just to revert it if I don't like
| how it looks or works.
|
| 5. Mental exhaustion when working on multiple different
| projects/agent sessions is real, so I tend to only have one.
| Having to constantly switch mental model of a problem is much
| more draining than the "old" way of working on a single problem.
| Basically the more I give in into vibing the harder it is to
| review and understand.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| I am forced to use it. They want us to only have code written by
| Claude. We are forced to use spec-kit for everything so every PR
| has hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of markdown comitted to
| the repo per ticket. I basically only review code now. It changes
| so fast it is impossible to have a stable mental model of the
| application. My job is now to goto meetings, go through the
| motions of reviewing thousands of lines of slop per day while
| sending thousands of lines of slop to others. Everything I liked
| about the job has been stolen from me, only things I disliked or
| was indifferent to are left.
|
| If this is what the industry is now... this will be my last job
| in it.
|
| Curse everyone involved with creating this nightmare.
| makerofthings wrote:
| I am required to maximise my use of AI at work and so I do. It's
| good enough at simple, common stuff. Throw up a web page, write
| some python, munge some data in C++, all great as long as the
| scale is small. If I'm working on anything cutting edge or niche
| (which I usually am) then it makes a huge mess and wastes my
| time. If you have a really big code base in the ~50million loc
| range then it makes a huge mess.
|
| I really liked writing code, so this is all a big negative for
| me. I genuinely think we have built a really bad thing, that will
| take away jobs that people love and leave nothing but mediocrity.
| This thing is going to make the human race dumber and it's going
| to hold us back.
| block_dagger wrote:
| I work at a company that maintains one of the largest Rails
| codebases in the world (their claim, but believable). My
| experience has been the opposite - Claude and Cursor have done
| a wonderful job of helping me understand the implement new
| features in this gigantic codebase. I actually found out
| through AI that while I enjoy writing code, I enjoy building
| great software better, the coding was just a means to the end.
| mentalgear wrote:
| I use it mostly to explore the information space of architectural
| problems, but the constant "positive engagement feedback" (first
| line of each generation "brilliant insight") start being deeply
| insincere and also false by regularly claiming "this is the
| mathematically best solution - ready to implement ?" only that it
| isn't when considering it truly.
|
| I have moved away from using an LLM now before having figured out
| the specifications, otherwise it's very very risky to go down a
| wrong rabbit hole the LLM seduced you into via its "user
| engagement" training.
| jwr wrote:
| Measured 12x increase in issues fixed/implemented. Solo founder
| business, so these are real numbers (over 2 months), not
| corporate fakery. And no, I am not interested in convincing you,
| I hope all my competitors believe that AI is junk :-)
| amelius wrote:
| AI is great for getting stuff to work on technologies you're not
| familiar with. E.g. to write an Android or iOS app or an OpenGL
| shader, or even a Linux driver. It's also great for sysadmin work
| such as getting an ethernet connection up, or installing a docker
| container.
|
| For main coding tasks, it is imho not suitable because you still
| have to read the code and I hate reading other people's code.
|
| And also, the AI is still slow, so it is hard to stay focused on
| a task.
| block_dagger wrote:
| I am having a blast at work. I've been leaning hard into AI (as
| directed by leadership) while others are falling far far behind.
| I am building new production features, often solo or with one or
| two other engineers, at lightning speed, and being recognized
| across the org for it. This is an incredible opportunity for many
| engineers that won't last. I'm trying to make the most of it. It
| will be sad when software is no longer a useful pastimes for
| humans. I'm thinking another three years and most of us will be
| unemployed or our jobs will have been completely transformed into
| something unrecognizable a few short years ago.
| gooseyard wrote:
| I haven't actively looked into it, but on a couple of occasions
| after google began inserting gemini results at the top of the
| list, I decided to try using some of the generated code samples
| when then search didn't turn up anything useful. The results were
| a mixed bag- the libraries that I'd been searching for examples
| from were not very broadly used and their interfaces volatile
| enough that in some cases the model was returning results for
| obsolete versions. Not a huge deal since the canonical docs had
| some recommendations. In at least a couple of cases though, the
| results included references to functions that had never been in
| the library at all, even though they sounded not only plausible
| but would have been useful if they did in fact exist.
|
| In the end, I am generally using the search engine to find
| examples because I am too lazy to look at the source for the
| library I'm using, but if the choice is between an LLM that
| fabricates stuff some percentage of the time and just reading the
| fucking code like I've been doing for decades, I'd rather just
| take my chances with the search engine. If I'm unable to
| understand the code I'm reading enough to make it work, it's a
| good signal that maybe I shouldn't be using it at all since
| ultimately I'm going to be on the hook to straighten things out
| if stuff goes sideways.
|
| Ultimately that's what this is all about- writing code is a big
| part of my career but the thing that has kept me employed is
| being able to figure out what to do when some code that I
| assembled (through some combination of experimentation,
| documentation, or duplication) is not behaving the way I had
| hoped. If I don't understand my own code chances are I'll have
| zero intuition about why it's not working correctly, and so the
| idea of introducing a bunch of random shit thrown together by
| some service which may or may not be able to explain it to me
| would be a disservice to my employers who trust me on the basis
| of my history of being careful.
|
| I also just enjoy figuring shit out on my own.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Define "professional."
|
| I write stuff for free. It's _definitely_ "professional grade,"
| and lots of people use the stuff I ship, but I don't earn
| anything for it.
|
| I use AI every day, but I don't think that it is in the way that
| people here use it.
|
| I use it as a "coding partner" (chat interface).
|
| It has accelerated my work 100X. The quality seems OK. I have had
| to learn to step back, and let the LLM write stuff the way that
| it wants, but if I do that, and perform minimal changes to what
| it gives me, the results are great.
| balls187 wrote:
| Very powerful tool. In the right hands.
| max_ wrote:
| I use it as a research tool.
|
| What it has done is replace my Googling and asking people looking
| up stuff on stack over flow.
|
| Its also good for generating small boiler plate code.
|
| I don't use the whole agents thing and there are so many edge
| cases that I always need to understand & be aware of that the AI
| honestly think cannot capture
| owenpalmer wrote:
| It's a game changer for reading large codebases and debugging.
|
| Error messages were the "slop" of the pre-LLM era. This is where
| an LLM shines, filling in the gaps where software engineering was
| neglected.
|
| As for writing code, I don't let it generate anything that I
| couldn't have written myself, or anything that I can't keep in my
| brain at once. Otherwise I get really nervous about committing.
|
| The job of a software engineer does and always has relied upon
| taking responsibility for the quality of one's work. Whether it's
| auto-complete or a fancier auto-complete, the responsibility
| should rest on your shoulders.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Like many others I started feeling it had legs during the past
| few months. Tools and models reached some level where it suddenly
| started living up to some of the hype.
|
| I'm still learning how to make the most of it but my current
| state is one of total amazement. I can't believe how well this
| works now.
|
| One game-changer has been custom agents and agent orchestration,
| where you let agents kick off other agents and each one is
| customized and keeps a memory log. This lets me make several 1000
| loc features in large existing codebases without reaching context
| limits, and with documentation that lets me review the work with
| some confidence.
|
| I have delivered several features in large legacy codebases that
| were implemented while I attended meetings. Agents have created
| greenfield dashboards, admin consoles and such from scratch that
| would have taken me days to do myself, during daily standups. If
| it turned out bad, I tweaked the request and made another attempt
| over lunch. Several useful tools have been made that save me
| hours per week but I never took the time to make myself.
|
| For now, I love it. I do feel a bit of "mourning the craft" but
| love seeing things be realized in hours instead of days or weeks.
| jebarker wrote:
| I work in an R&D team as research scientist/engineer.
|
| Cursor and Claude Code have undoubtedly accelerated certain
| aspects of my technical execution. In particular, root causing
| difficult bugs in a complicated codebase has been accelerated
| through the ability to generate throwaway targeted logging code
| and just generally having an assistant that can help me navigate
| and understand complex code.
|
| However, overall I would say that AI coding tools have made my
| job harder in two other ways:
|
| 1. There's an increased volume of code that requires more
| thorough review and/or testing or is just generally not in
| keeping with the overall repo design.
|
| 2. The cost is lowered for prototyping ideas so the competitive
| aspect of deciding what to build or which experiment to run has
| ramped up. I basically need to think faster and with more clarity
| to perform the same as I did before because the friction of
| implementation time has been drastically reduced.
| bgdkbtv wrote:
| For professional work, I like to offload some annoying bug fixes
| to Claude and let it figure it out. Then, perusing the changes to
| make sure nothing silly is being added to the codebase. Sometimes
| it works pretty well. Other times, for complicated things I need
| to step in and manually patch. Overall, I'm a lot less stressed
| about meeting deadlines and being productive at work. On the
| other hand, I'm more stressed about losing my employment due to
| AI hype and its effectiveness.
|
| For my side projects, I do like to offload the tedious steps like
| setup, scaffolding or updating tasks to Claude. Things like weird
| build or compile errors that I usually would have to spend hours
| Googling to figure out I can get sorted in a matter of minutes.
| Other than that, I still like to write my own code as I enjoy
| doing it.
|
| Overall, I like it as a tool to assist in my work. What I dislike
| is how much peddling is being done to shove AI into everything.
| parasti wrote:
| We're using Augment Code heavily on a "full rewrite of legacy CRM
| with 30 years of business rules/data" Laravel project with a team
| size of 4. Augment kind of became impossible to avoid once we
| realized the new guy is outpacing the rest of us while posessing
| almost no knowledge of code and working fully in the business
| requirements domain, extracting requirements from the customer
| and passing them to AI, which was encoding them in tests and
| implementing them in code.
|
| I'm using `auggie` which is their CLI-based agentic tool. (They
| also have a VS Code integration - that became too slow and hung
| often the more I used it.) I don't use any prompting tricks, I
| just kind of steer the agent to the desired outcome by chatting
| to it, and switch models as needed (Sonnet 4.6 for speed and
| execution, GPT 5.1 for comprehension and planning).
|
| My favorite recent interaction with Augment was to have one
| session write a small API and its specification within the old
| codebase, then have another session implement the API client
| entirely from the specification. As I discovered edge cases I had
| the first agent document them in the spec and the second agent
| read the updated spec and adjust the implementation. That worked
| much, much better than the usual ad hoc back and forth directly
| between me and one agent and also created a concise specification
| that can be tracked in the repo as documentation for humans and
| context for future agentic work.
| florilegiumson wrote:
| It has reignited my passion for coding by making it so I don't
| have to use my coding muscle as much during the day to improve
| our technologically boring product.
| eleventhborn wrote:
| > If you've recently used AI tools for professional coding work,
| tell us about it.
|
| POCC (Plain Old Claude Code). Since the 4.5 models, It does 90%
| of the work. I do a final tinkering and polishing for the PR
| because by this point it is easy for me to fix the code than
| asking the model to fix it for me.
|
| The work: Fairly straightward UI + backend work on a website. We
| have designers producing Figma and we use Figma MCP to convert
| that to web pages.
|
| POCC reduces the time taken to complete the work by at least 50%.
| The last mile problem exist. Its not a one-shot story to PR
| prompt. There are a few back & forths with the model, some direct
| IDE edits, offline tests, etc. I can see how having
| subagents/skills/hooks/memory can reduce the manual effort
| further.
|
| Challenges: 1) AI first documentation: Stories have to be written
| with greater detail and acceptance criteria. 2) Code reviews:
| copilot reviews on Github are surprisingly insightful, but
| waiting on human reviews is still a bottleneck. 3) AI first
| thinking: Some of the lead devs are still hung up on certain best
| practices that are not relevant in a world where the machine
| generates most of the code. There is a friction in the code LLM
| is good at and the standards expected from an experienced
| developer. This creates busy work at best, frustration at worst.
| 4) Anti-AI sentiment: There is a vocal minority who oppose AI for
| reasons from craftsmanship to capitalism to global environment
| crisis. It is a bit political and slack channels are getting
| interesting. 5) Prompt Engineering: Im in EU, when the team is
| multi-lingual and English is adopted as the language of
| communication, some members struggle more than others. 6) Losing
| the will to code. I can't seem to make up my mind if the tech is
| like the invention of calculator or the creation of social media.
| We don't know its long term impact on producing developers who
| can code for a living.
|
| Personally, I love it. I mourn for the loss of the 10x engineer,
| but those 10x guys have already onboarded the LLM ship.
| trusche wrote:
| I've been using opencode and oh-my-opencode with Claude's models
| (via github Copilot). The last two or three months feel like they
| have been the most productive of my 28-year career. It's very
| good indeed with Rails code, I suspect it has something to do
| with the intentional expressiveness of Ruby plus perhaps some
| above-average content that it would be trained on for this
| language and framework. Or maybe that's just my bias.
|
| It takes a bit of hand holding and multiple loops to get things
| right sometimes, but even with that, it's pretty damn good. I
| don't usually walk away from it, I actively monitor what it's
| doing, peek in on the sub-agents, and interject when it goes down
| a wrong path or writes messy code. But more often than not, it
| goes like this: - Point at a GH issue or briefly
| describe the task - Either ask it to come up with a plan,
| or just go straight to implementation - When done, run
| *multiple* code review loops with several dedicated code review
| agents - one for idiomatic Rails code, one for maintainabilty,
| one for security, and others as needed
|
| These review loops are essential, they help clean up the code
| into something coherent most times. It really mirrors how I tend
| to approach tasks myself: Write something quickly that works,
| make it robust by adding tests, and then make it maintainable by
| refactoring. Just way faster.
|
| I've been using this approach on a side project, and even though
| it's only nights an weekends, it's probably the most robust,
| well-tested and polished solo project I've ever built. All those
| little nice-to-have and good-to-great things that normally fall
| by the wayside if you only have nights and weekends - all
| included now.
|
| And the funny thing is - I feel coding with AI like this gets me
| in the zone _more_ than hand-coding. I suspect it 's the absence
| of all those pesky rabbit holes that tend to be thrown up by any
| non-trivial code base and tool chain which can easily distract us
| from thinking about the problem domain and instead solving
| problems of our tools. Claude deals with all that almost as a
| side effect. So while it does its thing, I read through it's
| self-talk while thinking along about the task at hand,
| intervening if I disagree, but I stay at the higher level of
| abstraction, more or less. Only when the task is basically done
| do I dive a level deeper into code organisation, maintainability,
| security, edge cases, etc. etc.
|
| Needless to say that very good test coverage is essential to this
| approach.
|
| Now, I'm very ambiguous about the AI bubble, I believe very
| firmly that it is one, but for _coding_ specifically, it 's a
| paradigm shift, and I hope it's here to stay.
| Ger_Onimo wrote:
| I'm mostly really enjoying it! While it's not my main job, I've
| always been a tool builder for teams I work on, so if I see a
| place where a little UI or utility would make people's life
| easier, I'd usually hack something together in a few hours and
| evolve it over time if people find it useful. That process is
| easily 10x faster than before.
|
| My main work is training Text-to-Speech models, and the friction
| of experimenting with model features or ideas has dropped
| massively. If I want to add a new CFG implementation, or
| conditioning vector, 90% of the time Opus can one-shot it. It
| generally does a good job of making the model, inference and
| training changes simultaneously so everything plays nicely.
| Haven't had any major regressions or missed bugs yet, but we'll
| see!
|
| The downside is reviewing shitty PRs where it's clear the
| engineer doesn't fully understand what they're doing, and just a
| general attitude of "I dunno, Claude suggested it" that's getting
| pretty exhausting.
| shmel wrote:
| I got insanely more productive with Claude Code since Opus 4.5.
| Perhaps it helps that I work in AI research and keep all my
| projects in small prototype repos. I imagine that all models are
| more polished for AI research workflow because that's what
| frontier labs do, but yeah, I don't write code anymore. I don't
| even read most of it, I just ask Claude questions about the
| implementation, sometimes ask to show me verbatim the important
| bits. Obviously it does mistakes sometimes, but so do I and
| everyone I have ever worked with. What scares me that it does
| overall fewer mistakes than I do. Plan mode helps tremendously, I
| skip it only for small things. Insisting on strict verification
| suite is also important (kind of like autoresearch project).
| greenpizza13 wrote:
| I work at a very prominent AI company. We have access to every
| tool under the sun. There are various levels of success for all
| levels -- managers, PMs, engineers.
|
| We have cursor with essentially unlimited Opus 4.6 and it's
| fundamentally changed my workflow as a senior engineer. I find I
| spend much more time designing and testing my software and
| development time is almost entirely prompting and reviewing AI
| changes.
|
| I'm afraid my coding skills are atrophying, in fact I know the
| are, but I'm not sure if the coding was the part of my job I
| truly enjoyed. I enjoy thinking higher-level: architecture,
| connecting components, focusing on the user experience. But I
| think using these AI tools is a form of golden handcuffs. If I go
| work at a startup without the money I pay for these models, I
| think for the first time in my career I would be less likely to
| be able to successfully code a feature than I could last year.
|
| So professionally there are pros and cons. My design and
| architecture skills have greatly improved as I am spending more
| time doing this.
|
| Personally it's so much fun. I've made several side projects I
| would have never done otherwise. Working with Claude code on
| greenfield projects is a blast.
| abcde666777 wrote:
| I think people get a bit paranoid about coding skills
| atrophying. I had a period where I stopped programming for
| multiple years and it really only took a month to get back into
| the swing of things when I returned, and most of that was just
| re-jogging my memory on the syntax and standard library classes
| (C++ at the time).
| piker wrote:
| I am working on a sub 100KLOC Rust application and can't
| productively use the agentic workflows to improve that
| application.
|
| On the other hand, I have tried them a number of times in
| greenfield situations with Python and the web stack and
| experienced the simultaneous joy and existential dread of others.
| They can really stand new projects up quick.
|
| As a founder, this leaves me with what I describe as the
| "generation ship" problem. Is it possible that the architecture
| we have chosen for my project is so far out of the training data
| that it would be _faster_ to ditch the project and reimplement it
| from scratch in a Claude-yolo style? So far, I 'm convinced not
| because the code I've seen in somewhat novel circumstances is
| fairly mid, but it's hard to shake the thought.
|
| I do find chatting with the models incredibly helpful in all
| contexts. They are also excellent at configuring services.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I'm surprised there's no more attempts to stablize around a
| base model, like in stable diffusion, then augment those models
| with LoRas for various frameworks, and other routine patterns.
| There's so much going into trying to build these omnimodels,
| when the technology is there to mold the models into more
| useful paradigms around frameworks and coding patterns.
|
| Especially, now that we do have models that can search through
| code bases.
| humbleharbinger wrote:
| I'm an engineer at Amazon - we use Kiro (our own harness) with
| Opus 4.6 underneath.
|
| Most of my gripes are with the harness, CC is way better.
|
| In terms of productivity I'm def 2-4X more productive at work,
| >10x more productive on my side business. I used to work overtime
| to deliver my features. Now I work 9-5 and am job hunting on the
| side while delivering relatively more features.
|
| I think a lot of people are missing that AI is not just good for
| writing code. It's good for data analysis and all sorts of other
| tasks like debugging and deploying. I regularly use it to manage
| deployment loops (ex. make a code change and then deploy the
| changes to gamma and verify they work by making a sample request
| and verifying output from cloudwatch logs etc). I have built
| features in 2 weeks that would take me a month just because I'd
| have to learn some nitty technical details that I'd never use
| again in my life.
|
| For data analysis I have an internal glue catalog, I can just
| tell it to query data and write a script that analyzes X for me.
|
| AI and agents particularly have been a huge boon for me. I'm
| really scared about automation but also it doesn't make sense to
| me that SWE would be automated first before other careers since
| SWE itself is necessary to automate others. I think there are
| some fundamental limitations on LLMs (without understanding the
| details too much), but whatever level of intelligence we've
| currently unlocked is fundamentally going to change the world and
| is already changing how SWE looks.
| jgilias wrote:
| I saw somewhere that you guys had All Hands where juniors were
| prohibited from pushing AI-assisted code due to some
| reliability thing going on? Was that just a hoax?
| jansan wrote:
| It is great to solve "puzzle" problems and remove road blocks. In
| the past, whenever I got stuck, I often got frustrated and gave
| up. In so many cases AI hints to the corret solution and helps me
| continue. It's like a knowledgeable colleague that you can ask
| for help when you get stuck.
|
| Another thing is auditing and code polishing. I asked Claude to
| polish a working, but still rough browser pluging, consisting of
| two simple Javascript files. It took ten iterations and a full
| day of highly intensive work to get the quality I wanted. I would
| say the result is good, but I could not do this process vey often
| without going insane. And I do not want to do this with a more
| complex project, yet.
|
| So, yes, I am using it. For me it's a tool, knowledge resource,
| puzzle solver, code reviewer and source for inspiration. It's not
| a robot to write my code.
|
| And never trust it blindly!
| fandango1 wrote:
| So I am a software engineer at Microsoft, so we have been using
| the Github Copilot very regularly. It gives us unlimited Opus
| credits.
|
| The good thing is that the work gets much quicker than before,
| and it's actually a boon for that
|
| The issue is inflated expectations
|
| For example: If a work item ideally would take two weeks before
| AI, it is expected now to be done in like 2 days.
|
| So we still need to find a sweet spot so that the expectations
| are not unbelievable.
|
| MS is a mature place so they're still working on it and take our
| feedback seriously. at least that's what I have seen
| dude250711 wrote:
| _> If a work item ideally would take two weeks before AI, it is
| expected now to be done in like 2 days.
|
| > MS is a mature place so they're still working on it and take
| our feedback seriously. at least that's what I have seen _
|
| Suggested feedback then, for them to take seriously: "your
| expectations are inflated".
| peab wrote:
| It's been great - I work on a lot of projects that are
| essentially prototypes, to test out different ideas. It's amazing
| for this - I can create web apps in a day now, which in the past
| I would not have been able to create at all, as I spent most of
| my career on the backend.
| sgillen wrote:
| I use it all the time now, switching between claude code, codex,
| and cursor. I prefer CC and codex for now but everyone is copying
| everyone else's homework.
|
| I do a lot of green field research adjacent work, or work
| directly with messy code from our researchers. It's been
| excellent at building small tools from scratch, and for
| essentially brute forcing undocumented code. I can give it a
| prompt like "Here is this code we got from research, the docs are
| 3 months out of date and don't work, keep trying things until you
| manage to get $THING running".
|
| Even for more production and engineering related tasks I'm
| finding it speeds up velocity. But my engineering is still closer
| to greenfield than a lot of people here.
|
| I do however feel less connected to the code, even when reviewing
| thoroughly, I feel like I internalize things at a high level,
| rather than knowing every implementation detail off the dome.
|
| The other downside is I get bigger and more frequent code review
| requests from colleagues. No on is just handing me straight up
| slop (yet...)
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm always skeptical to new tech, I don't like how AI companies
| have reserved all memory circuits for X years, that is definitely
| going to cause problems in society when regular health care
| sector businesses can't scale or repair their infra, and the
| environmental impact is also a discussion that I am not qualified
| to get into.
|
| All I can say for sure is that it is absolutely useful, it has
| improved my quality of life without a doubt. I stick to the
| principle that it's here to improve my work life balance, not
| increase output for our owners.
|
| And that it has done, so far. I can accomplish things that would
| have taken me weeks of stressful and hyperfocused work in just
| hours.
|
| I use it very carefully, and sparingly, as a helpful tool in my
| toolbox. I do not let it run every command and look into every
| system, just focused efforts to generate large amounts of
| boilerplate code that would require me to have a lot of docs open
| if I were to do it myself.
|
| I definitely don't let it read or write my e-mails, or write any
| text. Because I always loved writing, and will never stop loving
| it.
|
| It's here to stay, because I'm not alone in feeling this way
| about it. So the staunch AI-deniers are just wasting their time.
| Just like any other tech, it's going to be used against humans,
| against the already oppressed.
|
| I definitely recognize that the tech has made some people lose
| their minds. Managers and product owners are now vibe coding
| thinking they can replace all their developers. But their code
| base will rot faster than they think.
| tryauuum wrote:
| I had a couple of nice moments, like claude helping me with rust
| (which I don't understand) and claude finding a bug in a python
| library I was using
|
| Also some not so nice moments (small rust changes were OK, but
| with a big one claude fumbled + I couldn't really verify that it
| worked so I didn't merge to code to master even when it seemingly
| worked)
|
| I think it really helps to break the ice so to say. You no longer
| feel the tension, the pain of an empty page. You ask claude to
| write something, and improving something is so mentally easier
|
| Also I mostly use claude as a spell checker / linter for the
| projects I'm too lazy to install proper tools for that. vim +
| claude, what else would you need
|
| Luckily my company pays for the subscription, speding personal
| money on LLMs (especially on US LLMs) would feel strange for some
| reason. Ideally I want to own an LLM, have it at home but I am
| too lazy
| ecopoesis wrote:
| I'm a manager at a large consumer website. My team and I have
| built a harness that uses headless Claude's (running Opus) to do
| ticket work, respond to and fix PR comments, and fix CI test
| failures. Our only interaction with code is writing specs in Jira
| tickets (which we primarily do via local Claudes) and adding PR
| comments to GitHub PRs.
|
| The speed we can move at is astounding. We're going to finish our
| backlog next quarter. We're conservatively planning on launching
| 3x as many features next quarter.
|
| Claude is far from perfect: it's made us reassess our coding
| standards since code is primarily for Claude now, not for humans.
| So much of what we did was to make code easier for the next dev,
| and that just doesn't matter anymore.
| jtrueb wrote:
| AI-assisted research is a solid A already. If you are doing
| greenfield then. The horizon is only blocked by the GUI required
| tooling. Even then, that is a small enough obstruction for most
| researchers.
| keithnz wrote:
| Pretty good, we have a huge number of projects, some more modern
| than others. For the older legacy systems, it's been hugely
| useful. Not perfect, needs a bit more babysitting, but a lot
| easier to deal with than doing it solo. For the newer things,
| they can mostly be done solely by AI, so more time spent just
| speccing / designing the system than coding. But every week we
| are working out better and batter ways of working with AI, so
| it's an evolving process at the moment
| PerryStyle wrote:
| I work in HPC and I've found it very useful in creating various
| shell scripts. It really helps if you have linters such as
| shellcheck.
|
| Other areas of success have been just offloading the
| typing/prototyping. I know exactly how the code should look like
| so I rarely run into issues.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| For me the AI is just okay. Invaluable for personal projects but
| a little bit take or leave at work. It just makes too many little
| mistakes, i still have to babysit it, it's too much effort.
|
| Sadly though my manager uses Claude for EVERYTHING and is
| completely careless with it. Hallucinations in performance
| reviews, hallucinations in documentation, trash tier PRs. He's so
| gung-ho that some of my peers are now also submitting Claude
| written PRs that they haven't even bothered to check whether they
| build correctly.
|
| So the social aspect is very bad. I'm stuck correcting other
| people's slop and reading nonsense PRs a few times a week.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| My current employer is taking a long time to figure out how they
| think they want people to use it, meanwhile, all my side projects
| for personal use are going quite strong.
| gamerDude wrote:
| I find it useful. It has been a big solve from a motivation
| perspective. Getting into bad API docs or getting started on a
| complex problem, it's easy to have AI go with me describing it.
| And the other positive is front end design. I've always hated css
| and it's derivatives and AI makes me now decent.
|
| The negatives are that AI clearly loves to add code, so I do need
| to coach it into making nice abstractions and keeping it on
| track.
| ramoz wrote:
| Right now I enjoy the labs' cli harnesses, Claude Code, and Codex
| (especially for review). I do a bunch of niche stuff with Pi and
| OpenCode. My productivity is up. Some nuances with working with
| others using the same AI tools- we all end up trying to boil the
| ocean at first- creating a ton of verbose docs and massive PRs,
| but I/they end up regressing on throwing up every sort of LLM
| output we get. Instead, we continously refine the outputs in a
| consumable+trusted way.
|
| My workday is fairly simple. I spend all day planning and
| reviewing.
|
| 1. For most features, unless it's small things, I will enter plan
| mode.
|
| 2. We will iterate on planning. I built a tool for this, and it
| seems that this is a fairly desired workflow, given the
| popularity through organic growth.
| https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator - This
| is a very simple tool that captures the plan through a hook
| (ExitPlanMode) and creates a UI for me to actually read the plan
| and annotate, with qol things like viewing plan diffs so I can
| see what the agent changed.
|
| 3. After plan's approved, we hit eventual review of
| implementation. I'll use AI reviewers, but I will also manually
| review using the same tool so that I can create annotations and
| iterate through a feedback loop with the agents.
|
| 4. Do a lot of this / multitasking with worktrees now.
|
| Worktrees weren't something I truly understood the value of for a
| while, until a couple weeks ago, embarrassingly enough:
| https://backnotprop.com/blog/simplifying-git-worktrees/
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Worktrees slap.
| hasahmed wrote:
| Hating it TBH. I feel like it took away a lot of what I enjoyed
| about programming but its often so effective and I'm under so
| much pressure to be fast that I can't not use it.
| mberning wrote:
| It is a very mixed bag. I have enjoyed using opus 4.5 and 4.6 to
| add functionality to existing medium complexity codebases. It's
| great for green field scripts and small POCs. I absolutely cannot
| stand reviewing the mostly insane PRs that other people generate
| with it.
| jellyfishbeaver wrote:
| Same attitudes as others in this thread.
|
| For personal projects and side company, I get to join in on some
| of the fun and really multiply the amount of work I can get
| through. I tend to like to iterate on a project or code base for
| awhile, thinking about it and then tearing things down and
| rebuilding it until I arrive at what I think is a good
| implementation. Claude Code has been a really great companion for
| this. I'd wager that we're going to see a new cohort of
| successful small or solo-founder companies that come around
| because of tools like this.
|
| For work, I would say 60% of my company's AI usage is probably
| useless. Lots of churning out code and documents that generate no
| real value or are never used a second time. I get the sense that
| the often claimed "10x more productive" is not actually that, and
| we are creating a whole flood of problems and technical debt that
| we won't be able to prompt ourselves out of. The benefit I have
| mostly seen myself so far is freeing up time and automating
| tedious tasks and grunt work.
| robbbbbbbbbbbb wrote:
| Context: micro (5 person) software company with a mature SaaS
| product codebase.
|
| We use a mix of agentic and conversational tools, just pick your
| own and go with it.
|
| For Unity development (our main codebase and source of value) I
| give current gen tools a C- for effectiveness. For solving
| confined, well modularisable problems (eg refactor this texture
| loader; implement support for this material extension) it's good.
| For most real day to day problems it's hopelessly confused by the
| large codebase full of state, external dependency on chunks of
| Unity, implicit hardware-dependent behaviours, etc. It has no
| idea how to work meaningfully with Unity's scene graph or
| component model. I tried using MCP to empower it here: on a
| trivial test project it was fine. In a real project it got
| completely lost and broke everything after eating 30k tokens and
| 40 minutes of my time, mostly because it couldn't understand the
| various (documented) patterns that straddled code files and scene
| structure.
|
| For web and API development I give it an A, with just a little
| room for improvement. In this domain it's really effective all
| the way down the logical stack from architectural and deployment
| decisions all the way down to implementation details and
| debugging including digging really deep in to package version
| incompatibilities and figuring out problems in seconds that would
| take me hours. My one criticism would be the - now familiar -
| "junior developer" effect where it'll often run ahead with an
| over engineered lump of machinery without spotting a simpler more
| coherent pattern. As long as you keep an eye on it it's fine.
|
| So in summary: if what you're doing is all in text, nothing in
| binary, doesn't involve geometric or numerical reasoning, and has
| billions of lines of stack overflow solutions: you'll be golden.
| Otherwise it's still very hit and miss.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Models aren't reliable, and it's a bottleneck.
|
| My solution was to write code to force the model down a
| deterministic path.
|
| It's open source here: https://codeleash.dev
|
| It's working! ~200k LOC python/typescript codebase built from
| scratch as I've grown out the framework. I probably wrote
| 500-1000 lines of that, so ~99.5% written by Claude Code. I
| commit 10k-30k loc per week, code-reviewed and industrial
| strength quality (mainly thanks to rigid TDD)
|
| I review every line of code but the TDD enforcement and self-
| reflection have now put both the process and continual
| improvement to said process more or less on autopilot.
|
| It's a software factory - I don't build software any more, I walk
| around the machine with a clipboard optimizing and fixing
| constraints. My job is to input the specs and prompts and give
| the factory its best chance of producing a high quality result,
| then QA that for release.
|
| I keep my operational burden minimal by using managed platforms -
| more info in the framework.
|
| One caveat; I am a solo dev; my cofounder isn't writing code. So
| I can't speak to how it is to be in a team of engineers with this
| stuff.
| yaxfaxyax wrote:
| It's useful. At my company we have an internal LLM that tends to
| be used in lieu of searching the web, to avoid unintentionally
| leaking information about what we are working on to third
| parties. This includes questions about software development,
| including generating of code. For various reasons we are not
| permitted to copy this verbatim, but can use it for guidance -
| much like, say, inspiration from Stack Overflow answers.
| viccis wrote:
| 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 by other peoples'
| Claude.
|
| It has also enabled a few people to write code or plan out
| implementation details who haven't done so in a long (sometimes
| decade or more) time, and so I'm getting some bizarre
| suggestions.
|
| Otherwise, it really does depend on what kind of code. I hand
| write prod code, and the only thing that AI can do is review it
| and point out bugs to me. But for other things, like a throwaway
| script to generate a bunch of data for load testing? Sure, why
| not.
| deadbabe wrote:
| The best thing to do is to schedule meetings with those people
| to go over the docs with them. Now you force them to eat their
| own shit and waste their own time the more output they create.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I had Claude review one. It was... not complimentary. Seemed
| to help a bit.
| caminante wrote:
| Love the intent, but isn't that wishful if you don't have any
| leverage? e.g., the higher up will trade you for someone who
| doesn't cause friction or you waste too much of your own
| time?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| [delayed]
| mindwok wrote:
| I quit my job and went out on my own freelancing.
|
| So far, it's been fantastic. I can do more things for clients,
| much faster, than I ever dreamed would be possible when I've
| attempted work like this before.
|
| I think the biggest problem with AI coding is that it simply
| doesn't fit well into existing enterprise structures. I couldn't
| imagine being able to do anything productive when I'm stuck
| having to rely on other teams or request access to stuff from the
| internet like I did in previous jobs.
| tdiff wrote:
| I just wonder if there are comments in this thread from anthropic
| bots, marketing itself
| gxs wrote:
| I'd be more curious to hear about the processes people have put
| in place for AI code reviews
|
| On the one hand, past some threshold of criticality/complexity,
| you can't push AI unreviewed, on the other, you can't relegate
| your senior best engineers to do nothing but review code
|
| It doesn't just not scale, it makes their lives miserable
|
| So then, what's the best approach?
|
| I think over time that threshold I mentioned will get higher and
| higher, but at the moment the ratio of code that needs to be
| reviewed to reviewers is a little high
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| Net negative. I do find it genuinely useful for code review, and
| "better search engine" or snippets, and sometimes for rubber
| ducking, but for agent mode and actual longer coding tasks I
| always end up rewriting the code it makes. Whatever it produces
| always looks like one of those students who constantly slightly
| misunderstands and only cares about minor test objectives, never
| seeing the big picture. And I waste so much time on the hope that
| _this time_ it will make me more productive if only I can nudge
| it in the right direction, maybe I 'm not holding it right, using
| the right tools/processes/skills etc. It feels like javascript
| frameworks all over again.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| It is definitely making me more productive.
|
| Tasks where, in the past, I have thought "if I had a utility to
| do x it would save me y time" and I'd either start and give up or
| spend much longer than y on it are now super easy, create a
| directory, claude "create an app to do x" so simple.
| er453r wrote:
| For my specific niche (medical imaging) all current models still
| suck. The amount of expert knowledge required to understand the
| data and display it in the right way - probably never was in the
| training set.
|
| We have this one performance-critical 3D reconstruction engine
| part, that just just has to go FAST through billions of voxels.
| From time to time we try to improve it, by just a bit. I have
| probably wasted at least 2 full days with various models trying
| out their suggestions for optimizations and benchmarking on real-
| world data. NONE produced an improvement. And the suggested
| changes look promising programming-wise, but all failed with
| real-world data.
|
| These models just always want to help. Even if there is just no
| way to go, they will try to suggest something, just for the sake
| of it. I would just like the model to say "I do not know", or
| "This is also the best thing that I can come up with"...
| Niche/expert positions are still safe IMHO.
|
| On the other hand - for writing REST with some simple business
| logic - it's a real time saver.
| abcde666777 wrote:
| Two contexts:
|
| 1. Workplace, where I work on a lot of legacy code for a crusty
| old CRM package (Saleslogix/Infor), and a lot of SQL integration
| code between legacy systems (System21).
|
| So far I've avoided using AI generated code here simply because
| the AI tools won't know the rules and internal functions of these
| sets of software, so the time wrangling them into an
| understanding would mitigate any benefits.
|
| In theory where available I could probably feed a chunk of the
| documentation into an agent and get some kind of sensible output,
| but that's a lot of context to have to provide, and in some cases
| such documentation doesn't exist at all, so I'd have to write it
| all up myself - and would probably get quasi hallucinatory output
| as a reward for my efforts.
|
| 2. Personally where I've been working on an indie game in Unity
| for four years. Fairly heavy code base - uses ECS, burst, job
| system, etc. From what I've seen AI agents will hallucinate too
| much with those newer packages - they get confused about how to
| apply them correctly.
|
| A lot of the code's pretty carefully tuned for performance
| (thousands of active NPCs in game), which is also an area I don't
| trust AI coding at all, given it's a conglomeration of 'average
| code in the wild that ended up in the training set'.
|
| At most I sometimes use it for rubber ducking or performance. For
| example at one point I needed a function to calculate the point
| in time at which two circles would collide (for npc steering and
| avoidance), and it can be helpful to give you some grasp of the
| necessary math. But I'll generally still re-write the output by
| hand to tune it and make sure I fully grok it.
|
| Also tried to use it recently to generate additional pixel art in
| a consistent style with the large amount of art I already have.
| Results fell pretty far short unfortunately - there's only a
| couple of pixel art based models/services out there and they're
| not up to snuff.
| paseante wrote:
| Most comments here describe the limitations of current AI coding
| as if they're permanent. They're not -- they're symptoms of v1
| tooling hitting v0 workflows.
|
| Today I built a complete MCP server in Clojure in a single
| session with Claude Code -- API integration, cookie auth, HTML
| scraping, CSRF token handling, JSON-RPC stdio protocol. From zero
| to deployed and working. That's not "autocomplete on steroids",
| that's a fundamentally different way of building software.
|
| But I also contribute documentation patches to the Linux kernel,
| Kubernetes, Node.js, and LLVM with AI assistance. The pattern is
| always the same: AI gets you 80% there fast, then a human
| reviewer catches the 20% that matters -- wrong terminology,
| misunderstood protocol semantics, subtle inaccuracies. The AI
| doesn't replace the reviewer. It replaces the blank page.
|
| What I see in this thread is people evaluating a caterpillar and
| concluding it will never fly. The tooling is evolving monthly.
| Six months ago half of what I did today wasn't possible. The
| engineers who will thrive aren't the ones who refuse to use it or
| the ones who blindly trust it -- they're the ones building muscle
| memory for the feedback loop between human judgment and machine
| output. That skill compounds.
| chr15m wrote:
| I measured my output:
|
| - 1.5x more commits. - 2x more issues closed.
|
| The commits are real. I'm not doing "vibe coding" or even agentic
| coding. I'm doing turn-by-turn where I micromanage the LLM, give
| specific implementation instructions, and then read and run the
| output before committing the code.
|
| I'm more than happy with 2x issues closed. For my client work it
| means my wildly optimistic programmer estimates are almost
| accurate now.
|
| I did have a frustrating period where a client was generating
| specs using ChatGPT. I was simply honest: "I have no idea what
| this nonsense means, let's meet to discuss the new requirements."
| That worked.
| molave wrote:
| 1. Generate unit tests beyond the best-case scenario. Analogy:
| Netflix's Chaos Monkey
|
| 2. Incremental cleanup: I also use it as a fancier upgrade of
| Visual Studio's Code Analysis feature and aid me in finding areas
| to refactor.
|
| 3. Treating the model as a corpus of prior knowledge and
| discussions, I can form a 'committee of agents' (Security,
| Reliability, UX engineer POVs) to help me view my work at a more
| strategic level.
|
| My additional twist to this is to check against my organization's
| mission statement. That way, I hope I can help reduce mission
| drift that I observe was a big issue behind dysfunctional
| companies.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| A big stumbling block is that my company is pushing it so hard
| that I'm nervous about what they want. If I over rely on it am I
| a shitty engineer burning too many tokens and will be penalized?
| If I don't use it will I not be a team player and also penalized?
| What do they want?
|
| Also- who is liable when it spits out copyrighted or patented
| code? Feels like a legal minefield.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| [delayed]
| mikelevins wrote:
| It's going pretty well, though it took at least six months to get
| there. I'm helped by knowing the domain reasonably well, and
| working with a principal investigator who knows it well and who
| uses LLMs with caution. At this stage I use Claude for coding and
| research that does not involve sensitive matters, and local-only
| LLMs for coding and research that does. I've gradually developed
| some regular practices around careful specification, boundaries,
| testing, and review, and have definitely seen things go south a
| few times. Used cautiously, though, I can see it accelerating
| progress in carefully-chosen and -bounded work.
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