Ask HN: I give in, what are the resources for picking up AI-assisted coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I give in, what are the resources for picking up AI-assisted coding?

4 pointsdhosek7 comments

I’m very much an AI skeptic. My limited exposure has me thinking, OK, it sometimes reduces typing, but it’s as often wrong as not, but then I hear people talking about big productivity increases with AI. So what are the tools people are using? Ideally, I don‘t want to have to learn a new IDE (I’m firmly ensconced in the Jetbrains family of IDEs), but I guess if I must I must. Pointers to good tutorials (I prefer text over video) and documentation would be welcome.

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I don't use AI for writing code directly. If I am working with a new framework or SDK I'll ask it for examples of how to do something, and then write the final implementation myself. This saves a lot of time digging through poorly written docs or decade old StackOverflow posts. However do keep in mind that it does sometimes make stuff up, so you have to keep an eye on it.

I'm a solo dev and also use it to rubber duck what I am planning to do. I can give it my requirements and it helps me to refine my plan. This is what I mostly use it for.

I know people say it is great for writing boilerplate, but I just don't find myself writing much boiler plate.

Don't give in to the dark side! But if you must, there's actually stuff built in to JetBrains IDE's

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai-assistant/code-completion....

This piece by Simon Willison is a good overview. Covers setting expectations, having conversations about the project, context management, and then building an example using Claude Code.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

He has several other posts describing other small projects he's done.

When you get stuck on something, or recognize a tedious task, pass an LLM the minimal set of info to complete the task. Fn sigs, structs, the error msg, and a terse description.

See, here’s the thing: I’ve been coding probably longer than you’ve been alive. I don’t need help with this kind of stuff. I can read docs and use Google (although the amount of incorrect stuff I see in the Google AI summaries makes me annoyed that it takes up real estate in the search results, not to mention all the AI-slop webpages).

Try Claude code, codex-cli, or gemini-cli. They are CLIs, as their name indicates. The Gemini one is free.

Amazing that I got four responses and this is the only one which offers some mildly useful information.

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