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Ask HN: Best practices using AI as an experienced web dev

9 points thebordella | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 23:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source

As an Old, I came up learning the OG web dev languages - HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc. As a solo dev, I still largely work with these as natively as possible. But I am not a total dinosaur. I embraced jQuery in the early 2000's, Bootstrap scaffolding, and now often build reactive UI's using Vue 3.

Still, I continue to be picky about the many abstractions-of-abstractions that litter the dev landscape, mostly devised to drive their founders' business models.

AI-driven co-pilots are red hot now, and I want to evaluate their usefulness to my style of dev work. I've begun dabbling with services like Codeium and Claude, particularly within VSCode.

At first these AI tools seem exciting. A whole function conjured out of thin air from a short prompt! But the more I test drive, the more I find that I'm spending my time trying to craft prompts that are accurate enough to generate the code I want. Whereas I could be using that time to just conceive and write the code myself.

If you are not already well-versed in your coding languages, these AI tools must save a ton of time and effort. My question is - what about you devs who are already proficient in your languages of choice? How do you leverage AI co-pilots to maximize their usefulness without just falling into the "distracted by another abstraction" hole?

1. chuangli ◴[20 Nov 24 01:32 UTC] No.42189977[source]▶
Plumbing, CRUD, looking up & hooking up APIs, docs, etc. Generally speaking, things that are low complexity & low uncertainty & code that you don't want to write yourself.

For experienced devs who already has solid understanding of the codebase they are working on, the potential upside of using AI is rather small. But if jumping into a new codebases, AI (with codebase context) can be used as a semantic search tool, or simply speed up the process of codebase understanding. And when it suggests code, it can surface patterns/conventions that were not documented. Need to be careful though, because it can repeat bad code too.

Disclosure: I'm building EasyCode, a context aware coding assistant.