news.ycombinator.com• 9h ago• 1 min read
Ask HN: AI writes better code than me. How to keep my identity?Nowadays, almost everyone codes with AI, right? I am a freelancer, and the entire market is now setting deadlines based on AI-assisted coding speeds. If you don't use AI, you simply cannot meet the deadlines. Because of this, I completely transitioned to AI-driven coding at the beginning of this year (starting around GPT-5.3).It's not that AI coding isn't fun. It is. But in the beginning, there were still many things AI couldn't do well. The community focus was on "Harness Engineering," attaching MCPs, or deep Prompt Engineering. I actually built and used quite a few custom AI tools during that phase.In the past, you had to provide not just your intent and direction, but also detailed, step-by-step instructions to reach that goal. Lately, though, even if you skip the detailed instructions, both Claude and GPT-5.6 handle it perfectly. You don't even have to agonize over which model to use. "Graph engineering" is currently trending, but it seems the models have already learned those patt