Ask HN: Advice for someone who wants to try AI-assisted coding?

Cursor + Claude Code.

Take a couple hours to walk CC through your code and generate a CLAUDE.md. Note any architecture patterns you have already, or want to have, in your project.

This is probably the most important thing you can do to drive better results. As you work, try to ensure you're getting independently testable steps as you solve a problem. Take time planning, always have it reference your CLAUDE.md and existing code patterns. At the end of each step, I have CC determine whether or not to update the CLAUDE.md if there's any foundational updates.

The trick is to have a idea of what you're expecting out of these tools. If you can use the tool to break down the work into individual pieces you will find it is really fun and productive way to build software. You still have to think, but you are able to cover a lot more ground faster. I can't type out 4 files that are in my brain in 10 seconds.

Cursor is kind of the default these days and has reasonable pricing. Both the completion and the agent work well. You could nitpick various options, but really it's ok and you can do a lot worse than Cursor.

An alternative is buying credit for a specific provider and using that with Aider. Which is also not bad.

None of the major players are likely to abuse your card. Just make sure you're either using a prepaid plan or prepaid credits with no auto topups.

I've heard, and it seems reasonable to me, that you should never get completely out of the loop when it comes to the actual code. Type it all in yourself so that you can get a real sense of it. Do not copy and paste.

If you do otherwise you're just creating legacy code at astonishing speed. This is fine as long as you throw it away after you're done.

Claude Code certainly not as easy to engineer with, though it is less expensive. For instance the @feature isn’t as robust as cursors ime. Also no shift+enter is quite a pain. Linting doesn’t “just work”, cursor with Claude 4.0 max is really thorough, I think even better than GPT-5. Not that Sonnet is better but that whatever “ensemble” of models cursor uses with sonnet seems to both adhere and tool call better than with GPT-5. GPT-5 often says what it will do and then says “say go and I’ll go” or says “you should run command x”, but doesn’t just DO it. Also for bug fixes in difficult codebases nothing beats Gemini 2.5 pro

  - Don't let it create function signatures or structs/classes.
  - Instruct it explicitly not to change variable names, or things unrelated to your query
  - Pass it exactly the information and code it needs to solve the task, and no more
  - If it starts going off the rails, or you're more than a few iterations in, start over. (Likely with modified context, including any parts of its results it did correctly)

I started with Github Copilot and VSCode. It has a free tier and is an easy way to try out AI-assisted development.

All the free tiers of the top products will allow you a days worth of coding if you are taking bite sized tasks such as defining methods and actually proofing to understand the results.

I have tried the spec-driven development with Gemini (Gemini-CLI) and VS Code for a few weeks.

It is definitely inspired by Kiro by Amazon. (unfortunately, I'm still on the wishlist.)

It works fine for me, and I would recommend this approach to understand how AI-assisted coding works.

Lex Fridman did an interview with Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. I think DHH actually keeps his AI in a separate window, and insists on retyping the suggestions it displays. (The act of typing the code somehow plants it more deeply in his memory, and he finds it more education.)

From the interview I got the impression that AI can help you learn or rob you or learning, depending on how you use it. Like, you can go fast or you can go slower-but-more-educational... Depends on what you're after, I guess.