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Ask HN: Where to get started with AI assisted coding?
5 points by par on March 12, 2025 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments
I've been programming for 2 decades now, so I'm a bit over the hill. And admittedly been in management roles so the only coding I do is in my spare time now. I mostly program Swift and Python. I'd like to get started by making some updates to a long standing python/django app I have, and then I'd like to look into making something from scratch for iphone. I'd like to use the best tools, and I'm fine with paying. Where to get started?


This article will be extraordinarily helpful to you: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

As someone with programming experience, I would personally recommend starting with Cursor. It has three modes: chat, composer, and agent, for varying degrees of “ask questions about my code” to “do the coding for me” so that you can experiment with different workflows. Since it’s an IDE and can import your settings from VSCode or similar it will also feel integrated/familiar.


Just read the Brian Hayes essay "AI and the end of programming" from 2023. It is a nice story about his experience with getting chatgpt to do some programing tasks and related discussion. As a spoiler he does not see the current state of thing as "the end of programing".

[1] : http://bit-player.org/2023/ai-and-the-end-of-programming


>he does not see the current state of thing

"From 2023" is an eternity in AI development. Do you mean that he was clickbaiting originally, or that he changed his mind, or just what?


2023 is a while but I thought it was a fair description of what LLMs are doing, how they work, and what that means for programing. The blog post is a discussion of work being done in the field (at the time at least). He did not say it is a pointless endeavor. It sounded more like LLMs are just not like a human mentor that can guide the way, but more like an assistant that might help with some of the grudge work (sort of).


> It sounded more like LLMs are just not like a human mentor that can guide the way, but more like an assistant that might help with some of the grudge work (sort of).

That matches my general impression (except that it does seem to "understand" some ideas in the sense of accurately modelling them, and it's not at all limited by typing speed).


My new article, License to Kill: Coding with Cursor AI Agents[0] is something you might enjoy. It's had a good response on Medium. If you do, let me know!

[0] https://levelup.gitconnected.com/license-to-kill-coding-with...


The Zed editor has integrates with pretty much every model provider, and comes with Claude 3.5 for free: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/releases




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