HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is your #1 practical lesson or "aha" moment from coding with AI?

9 points by johndavid9991 ↗ HN
As a developer, my own workflow has shifted completely over the last few months, but I feel like I'm still uncovering the best patterns. I'm curious about the specific inflection points where things clicked for others. Was it a shift in how you prompt, a change in your tech stack, or learning when not to trust the output?

11 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 29.0 ms ] thread
kasey_junk
The chat metaphor held me back for too long. These are black box functions that produce text and should be treated as such.

It came to me gradually that I was slowly replacing each part of my skills with scripts that took defined inputs, validated them, triggered agent sessions with defined prompts and spit out validated outputs in defined formats.

Now I do it proactively, if it looks like a function or a loop, or workflow encode it as such. My outcomes are better, I can use cheaper models and it’s easier to test.

jaredXX
Building a web app in a language I simple couldn't code in if put in from of Vim terminal (Flutter). The ability to iterate and express ideas at almost the speed of thought must have been what passengers felt like the first time they got in an airplane or car.
rimeice
Don’t use it for coding. Well at least using it for everything around coding rather than just coding itself was my aha moment, I realised I could understand new codebases way faster, brainstorm, sense check ideas draft better thought out arguments to my perspective and generally ask stupid questions. All of which has significantly increased my learning as a developer. Using it for coding itself is another matter.
dredmorbius
This Ask is quite similar to one which ran a couple of weeks ago, "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?" (1,182 comments):

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174>

Unless HN mods want to add this as (another) regular recurring feature, it might be considered a dupe.

hgsocket
getting know lot of new tech that actually have been around for years
rkochanowski
I realized how easily it can be confused and generate a bad answer in effect. It's difficult to control context when we have instructions in AGENTS/CLAUDE.md, memory, SKILLs, sometimes additional tools for optimization. On top of this our prompt. When coding agent misbehaves, there is often some issue on my side that steered it in a wrong direction. It requires more precision than I initially thought.