Hacker News Reader

Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

This resonated with me as someone who: has read the book of 5 rings (translated), has done quite a lot of martial arts and has been coding for ~50 years.

I work for myself developing apps and selling online. So I have no employer pushing to use AI. But I feel a bit like a dinosaur watching the incoming comet.

Currently, I just use MSCopilot as enhanced StackOverflow and I find it useful for that. But I have been nowhere near Cursor, Claude, harnesses, agents or 'vibe coding'.

It seems my options are:

1. Keep use AIs as an enhanced StackOverflow (e.g. to answer questions about APIs)

2. Embrace the new AI coding tools

Really not convinced about option 2. I don't trust AIs with code bases that I have built over 20 years. Also, I'm not far off retiring and I'm not sure I can be bothered to completely change how I work (again). Would be interested to hear what conclusions any fellow coding dinosaurs have come to.

View on HN

My suggestion would be just to try it. Get an openrouter account, add 50$ to it and setup pi agent to use it with a cheap and fast model; I personally use 5.6-Luna.

Run it on a throwaway system, pick a codebase you’ve always wanted to fix something about but didn’t have the time. Like you wanted to do a major refactoring or do a library migration to a better maintained library. Or you want to rewrite part of a program in rust for performance/security improvements.

The hardest part for me is sometimes it is hard to write what I want in a prompt; but you don’t have to put everything into the prompt, you can make a code edit as an example and then say; look at this diff, it is doing X; look for and apply this some transformation across codebase Y

If you have a good codebase, AI will have good patterns to follow and will produce pretty good code; and you can quickly iterate on the results (maybe over new context windows) and get high quality code that looks very close, if not indistinguishable from the pre-existing code.

>Run it on a throwaway system, pick a codebase you’ve always wanted to fix something about but didn’t have the time.

Thanks for the suggestion. But I don't have a throwaway system. All 3 of my codebases are commercial software that I charge money for. Also, I don't trust an AI not to serve substantial parts of my codebase to a competitor. Maybe I will try it if I start a new project. I fancy a go doing some Webassembly graphics at some point.

>Or you want to rewrite part of a program in rust for performance/security improvements.

My code is battle tested and robust through years of use. I don't rewrite stuff unless there is a real need.

>use it with a cheap and fast model

Also try it with a frontier model though. With $20 for a one-month sub you can get a decent amount of GPT-6 Astra usage.

I was in the same boat around March. I started with Claude and giving it really specific instructions about what I wanted. That turned in to more interactive planning sessions where after we nailed everything down I said, ok just do it and I reviewed. The more I used it the more I let go of some things and the more I held on others. Now I have adapted my entire approach to use both local and cloud agents. Start small. Find what fits you. Also try out different models. Closed source is very strong, but you may actually prefer a bit less capable model that you give more direction to.

Thanks!

To effectively use AI-as-an-engineer as a seasoned developer, you must change how you work. It won't work otherwise. Your knowledge & experience wouldn't allow you to ship raw AI code, you'll end up being frustrated instead.

An alternative way is using it as a pair programmer, which is one step above enhanced StackOverflow.

There are two ways to do this: 1. Subscribe to ChatGPT Pro (or the 20x version) for just one month and use Codex to generate the system you want—whatever it may be. 2. Purchase a Mac Studio or DGX Spark and use the latest local models to securely audit your code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com