Comment by ai_assisted_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ai_assisted_dev | Hacker News Reader

ai_assisted_dev

I have been in software for 20 years, and was just about to quit 2-3 years ago because of how mundane things became. And now I am actually loving it again because of AI. I'd say, AI writes 95% of my code, and I use it for 75% of the decisions during working on a project.

I am under MUCH more pressure to deliver more in shorter periods of time, with just me involved in several layers of decision making, rather than having a whole team. Which may sound scary, but it pays the bills. At one company I contract with, I now have 2 PMs; where I am the only dev on a production app with users, shipping new features every few days (rather than weeks).

It feels more like performance art, than it even feels like software development at this point. I am still waiting for some of my features to come crashing prod down in fantastic fashion, being paged at 3am in the morning; debugging for 12 hours straight because AI has built such a gigantic footgun for me.... but it has yet to happen. If anything I am doing less work than before - being paid a little more, and the companies working with me have built a true dependency on my skills to both ship, maintain and implement stuff.

Would you mind sharing your setup (LLM model, IDE, best practices)? Personally, I'm struggling to get value out of Continue.dev in VSCode (using Gemini 2.0 Flash by default, with the option to switch to more advanced models). I still revert to pasting code into ChatGPT chat window (using the website), frequently.

Are you using agentic features, given that you have not just one but two PMs?

  Not OP, but regarding your situation, I suggest moving to an agentic solution instead of “copy-pasting to GPT” — this will boost your coding productivity. There are several tools available, and to each their own, but try out Claude Code.

The biggest tip I can give you is to stay in the framework you are most convenient in, and have the most experience. Start building stuff the way you would by yourself, but then start delegating the repetitive tasks to an agent. My best recommendations would be using Cursor in Agent mode, and switching to VScode in Agent mode when your credits with Cursor run out. The reason why I like Cursor more is because of the Checkpoints. And VScode Copilot Agent checkpoints suck; but you can still use git to create your own checkpoints (git add / git stash, etc).

I don't even use completions, really just agent mode. I do planning, wireframing, creating specs all with agents. Even small MVPs created in 5 minutes, deployed in 10, during a meeting to just brainstorm. As for the models. Go with Claude 3.5 or 4.0, GPT5. Use sequentialthinking and Taskmaster MCP. I could write a book about it... but the best way to go about it is to dive into, get frustrated, push through and then learn it the hard way. I started delegating a lot of my programming work the day ChatGPT came out; just copy and pasting, and since that day, my reliance on AI has just been increasing, and I have been getting better at it (and now I am at this stage.. with 2 PMS).

Also to add another point is that if you felt like an agent did not help you correctly, or way overshot, did too much edits, etc. Go back to the original prompt, rephrase it - sometimes you need 1-2 times. Sometimes the model just don't work for your workflow. It can become quite delicate.

One of the bigger things is when you introduced some bug, start working backwards with the agent, simplifying whatever you build to its bare necessities, and the moment it dissapears, start a new chat, and build it back up to what it was before (in the desired non-bugged state). This often works if you then also switch to a completely different model.

I was thinking of doing something similar. I think I’m well positioned for this as I have a natural ability to juggle many contexts, I used to run a software agency, and I’m pretty good at architecture early on which means solutions come out more robust and flexible. I have had really good experience with AI tools and I’m constantly evolving my workflows.

I’m wondering how did you land your current gigs?

Thank you.

I land most of my clients by maintaining my blog and a github with open source projects. I have build a lot of general purpose MCPs and quite some tools, which are all written by Claude (3.5 and 4.0) and now GPT5. On my blog I just blog together with AI. It sounds silly, yes... I don't want to share it here publicly, but it looks good and it gets me people in my inbox (email/linkedin).

So I post on LinkedIn & Reddit, and I am not doing it in a spammy way. Do some outreach through LinkedIn and post on YCombinator on my personal account on the monthly who's hiring/freelancing posts. But a lot of the traffic I get comes from organic search and reddit -> clients. I had a client who told me they found me on Twitter; but I never even posted there, so someone reposted an article.

I am glad to hear that the content still works. I thought ChatGPT would kill all SEO and content marketing.

I usually do write the whole article. Maybe I spend an hour on it. Sometimes even much longer. And then I have a way of rewriting it with AI to improve the writing style. Which I then proof read and keep improving. I do this because reading back what I wrote feels even worse than listening to my own voice. It just gives me a visceral reaction lol. But yes this worked. I always wanted to write and blog prior to AI, but my aversion to proofreading my own writing stopped me from doing so over a decade (dozen actual genuine attempts).

Google does not mind. I rank quite highly for some niche keyword on LLM programming.

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