alt Hacker NewsHow did you learn how to use AI for coding? I'm open to the idea that a lot of "software carpentry" tasks (moving/renaming files, basic data analysis, etc) can be done with AI to free up time for higher level analysis, but I have no idea where to begin -- my focus many years ago was privacy, so I lean towards doing everything locally or hosted on a server I control so I lack a lot of knowledge of "the cloud" my HN betheren have.
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Think of some coding heavy project you always wanted to do but haven't had time for.
Open up cursor-agent to make the repo scaffolding in an empty dir. (build system, test harness, etc. )
Open up cursor or Claude code or whatever and just go nuts with it. Remember to follow software engineering best practices (one good change with tests per commit)
Practice on an open source repo to allay your privacy fears.
I love the name "software carpentry" haha.
IMO, I found those specific example tasks to be better handled by my IDE's refactoring features, though support for that is going to vary by project/language/IDE. I'm still more of a ludite when it comes to LLM based development tools, but the best case I've seen thus far is small first bites out of a big task. Working on an older no-tests code base recently, it's been things like setting up 4-5 tests that I'll expand on into a full test suite. You can't take more than a few "big" bites out of a task before you have 0 context as to what direction the vector soup sloshed in.
So, in terms of carpentry, I don't want an LLM framer who's work I need to build off of, but an LLM millworker handing me the lumber is pretty useful.