alt Hacker NewsI am sorry for asking, but... is there guide even on how to "figure it out"? Otherwise, how are you so sure about it?
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When a new technology emerges we typically see some people who embrace it and "figure it out".
Electronic synthesisers went from "it's a piano, but expensive and sounds worse" to every weird preset creating a whole new genre of electronic music.
So it seems plausible, like Claude's code, that our complaints about unmaintainable code are from trying to use it like a piano, and the rave kids will find a better use for it.
That's actually a great question. Truth be told the best way right now is to grab Codex CLI or Claude CLI (I strongly prefer Codex, but Claude has its fans), and just start. Immediately. Then go hard for a few months and you'll develop the skills you need.
A few tips for a quickstart:
Give yourself permission to play.
Understand basic concepts like context window, compaction, tokens, chain of thought and reasoning, and so on. Use AI to teach you this stuff, and read every blog post OpenAI and Anthropic put out and research what you don't understand.
Pick a hard coding problem in Python or Typescript and take a leap of faith and ask the agent to code it for you.
My favorite phrase when planning is: "Don't change anything. Just tell me.". Save this as a tmux shortcut and use it at the end of every prompt when planning something out.
Use markdown .md docs to create a planning doc and keep chatting to the agent about it and have it update the plan until you're super happy, always using the magic phrase "Don't change anything. Just tell me." (I should get myself a patent on that little number. Best trick I know)
Every time you see an anti-AI post, just move on. It's lazy people making lazy assumptions. Approach agentic coding with a sense of love, excitement, optimism, and take massive leaps of faith and you'll be very very surprised at what you find.
Best of luck Serious Angel.
How do you figure anything out? You go use it, a lot.
Right here: https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/10/30/the-ai-ready-so...
This series of articles is gold.
Unsurprisingly, writing good software with AI follows the same principles as writing it without AI. Keep scopes small. Ship, refactor, optimize, and write tests as you go.