Poll HN: Is there a skill to coding with AI?

I encourage anyone who has doubt about this question to try an experiment. Find a problem you are about to use an agent for or save one. Then ask a non dev to prompt the AI agent of your choice to try to fix it. You can even find a technical user or someone who uses AI regularly for non coding work.

I have done this a few times now and it is very apparent what experience, and skill, bring to the table.

Try to code blindly with AI and you'll waste more tokens because you don't have any idea on what you do, so you're dependant to AI solutions that often misleading and leading to "oh sorry, I implemented this while there's a simpler method, deleting the implementation and implementing the new implementation strategy".

EDIT: The author rightly pointed out that the question is in the title and not in the comment body. My apologies. :)

The poll question is not Yes/No. Am I saying, "Yes, coding with AI something anyone can do," or am I saying, "Yes, there a skill to doing it well"?

AI coding, at the level of ordinary scripts, generally doesn’t require much special skill. Things like Excel automation, for example. But building an entire program does require a certain kind of skill.

I spent 4 years hand coding a real time google docs competitor from the ground up with no libs (and got it working very nicely).

I found that easier to do than code up a production grade app with AI, mainly because hand coding was all easily provable end-to-end.

That's why I posted this poll, I was curious if others think it is a real skill.

There is skill involved in doing anything well.

Without any additional harness SKILLs, you’re not going to get something as good as a human will create - for larger/full applications, scripts and script sized apps is ok. Self promotion time: I have been working hard on this problem for a long time and have come up with a plugin to help. Currently just for Claude Code, but Codex and OpenCode versions are in the works. Its not necessarily going to speed up development, but the goal is to produce usable applications, not slop. I am using it to build my own apps, so it is under heavy active development. It also has a built in Kanban board for managing tasks.

Coder-Fleet: https://github.com/rzem-ai/coder-fleet