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Ask HN: What is the AI setup for an experienced dev starting on a new project?

5 points by postexitus ↗ HN
I have been working as a software developer for more than 20 years now. Been around the block a few times. Thanks to generous allowances in my current place, I've dipped my toes into LLM world and am quite impressed with it. However, we are on a legacy code base, LLM impact is limited in a sense. If I was to start a new project (let's say a web app with backend) - what is the state of the art for the setup? From Issue tracking, CI, automated deployments, agents, documentation etc - is there some blueprint I can just deploy and know that I am standing on the shoulders of giants?

5 comments

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CobaltFire
Very interested in the answers, as I'm in a similar situation.

Cofounder is using agents, I'm directly interacting with Claude and Codex. Self hosted forgejo due to Github issues.

mattbrewsbytes
Your job as an experienced developer is to ship working code, the fact that AI tools are here doesn't change that. I would strive to create as minimal a set of artifacts for AI as possible. Observing where we are today with 6 months or 12 months ago means the state of the art is constantly shifting. Spending a lot of effort implementing some concept you've read about or watched others talk about online might not be useful in 6 months. Its hard to discern valuable content vs. stuff people are finding gets lots of clicks these days.

If what you're creating isn't shippable to a customer/user then really scrutinize it. Things like AI skills, AI task loops, etc. those are all throw-away artifacts, the equivalent of Jira tickets. If you can get AI to help delivery without them, do that. The AI lab companies want you to use tokens but if you can automate something without AI in the mix, since you're experienced I assume you know shell scripting, automation concepts, etc., then automate it to work without token use. This is especially if you are doing something solo - your process and workflow can change on a whim so the least amount of overhead is going to keep you lean and focused on shipping software.

runjake
My sweet spot is the Codex app running separately from whichever IDE I'm using (VSCode or nvim). Codex is pointed at whatever work folder I'm working on.
warrenshi
The thing that changed the most for me wasn't the coding setup.

It was the order.

A couple years ago I'd think:

architecture database implementation deployment

Now I spend much more time before that asking:

does this map to a workflow people actually repeat?

AI made implementation so much cheaper that I've become much more cautious about building the wrong thing quickly.

nimblist
For me right now it's this but I'm constantly learning new approaches/improvements

Claude Code running on a dedicated debian lxc with tmux so I can pick sessions up from any machine. The key thing for me is to ensure that claude is constantly maintaining its own project documentation so that it's not reliant on any one session context. I've also set up custom commands to set up a clearly defined plan md file and to incrementally step through it updating completion as it goes.

From my perspective it's important to treat it as another potentially fallible team member. I have extensive unit tests, automation tests and SonarQube carries out analysis on all code merged to main.

Finally github actions to provide a proper ALMS with a non production environment for e2e testing.