Posted by svara 12 hours ago
Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
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.
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.
Fucking robot lol
What works: I stay in the driver's seat. I own the architecture, make the decisions, validate everything. But I don't need a team to execute — Claude does the implementation. I went from being a solo dev limited by time to running a complex project (multi-agent system, Docker, Synology integration, PHP API) that would normally need 2-3 people.
The key is a good CLAUDE.md file with strict rules, and pushing Claude to think ahead and propose multiple options instead of just doing the first thing that comes to mind. Claude is also surprisingly powerful for audits — security audits, config audits, log analysis.
What doesn't work: it confidently generates plausible-looking code that's subtly wrong. Never trust it on things you can't verify. It also over-engineers everything if you don't rein it in.
The biggest shift: I went from "write code" to "review and direct code." Not sure it's making me a better engineer, but it's making me a more effective one. It extends me.
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
I feel it made me better and other people worse.
GOOD:
I feel that I’m producing more and better code even with unfamiliar and tangled codebases. For my own side projects, it’s brought them from vague ideas to shipped.
I can even do analyses I never could otherwise. On Friday I converted my extensive unit test suite into a textual simulation of what messages it would show in many situations and caught some UX bugs that way.
Cursor’s Bugbot is genuinely helpful, though it can be irritatingly inconsistent. Sometimes on round 3 with Bugbot it suddenly notices something that was there all along. Or because I touch a few lines of a library suddenly all edge cases in that library are my fault.
NOT GOOD:
The effect on my colleagues is not good. They are not reading what they are creating. I get PRs that include custom circular dependency breakers because the LLM introduced a circular dependency, and decided that was the best solution. The ostensible developer has no idea this happened and doesn’t even know what a circular dependency breaker is.
Another colleague does an experiment to prove that something is possible and I am tasked to implement it. The experiment consists of thousands of lines of code. After I dig into it I realize the code is assuming that something magically happened and reports it’s possible.
I was reflecting on this and realized the main difference between me and my current team is that I won’t commit code I don’t understand. So I even use the LLMs to do refactors just for clarity. while sometimes my colleagues are creating 500-line methods.
Meanwhile our leaders are working on the problem of code review because they feel it’s the bottleneck. They want to make some custom tools but I suspect they are going to be vastly inferior to the tools coming from the major LLM providers. Or maybe we’ll close the loop and we won’t even be reviewing code any more.
1. Gemini as a replacement for Stack Overflow, but I always have to check the source because it sometimes gives examples that 10 or even 15+ years old, as if that’s a definitive answer. We cannot and should not trust that anything AI produces is correct.
2. Co-Pilot to assist in code snippets and suggestions, like a better Intellisense. Comes in handy for CLI tools such as docker compose, etc.
3. Co-Pilot to help comprehension of a code base. For example, to ask how a particular component works or to search for the meaning of a term of reference to it, especially if the term is vague or known by another name.
Believe it or not, we have just recently received guidance on AI-assisted work in general, and it’s mostly “it’s ok to use AI, but always verify it”, which of course seems completely reasonable, as you should do this with any work that you wouldn’t have done yourself.
while SO allowed for new answers to show up, any new nextjs bug i ask about that is not yet common place on SO, i get some allucionation telling me to use some made up code api based on the github issue discussion.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's useful tool, but whenever I have a LLM attempt to develop an entire feature for me, the solution becomes to a pain to maintain (because I don't have the mental model around it or the solution has subtle issues).
Maybe people who are really deep into using AI are using Claude? Perhaps it's way better, I don't know.
I only use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 on High Effort.
I always, ALWAYS treat my “new job” as writing a detailed ticket for whatever it is I need to do.
I give the model access to a DB replica of my prod DB that I create manually.
I do NOT waste time with custom agents, Claude.md files or any of that stuff.
When I put ALL of the above together, the results ARE THE PROMISED LAND: I simply haven’t written a single line of code manually in the last 3 months.
For me I have been a coder since a very young age and I am nearing the end of my career now. I still love writing code to problem solve just as much as the first day I learnt to code. The thought of something taking that task away from me doesn't fill me with glee.
A parallel for me is if I enjoyed puzzle pages and those brought me with joy and satisfaction employing my grey matter to solve, I just wouldn't find it interesting to have an agent complete the forms to me, with me simply guiding the agent to clues.