Ask HN: How are senior SWEs using AI?
I’m a SWE with ~5.5 years of professional experience now and anecdotally see AI used primarily by juniors who use it as a crutch. Moreover, the vast majority of the “best” engineers I know do not use any AI-assisted coding tools (e.g. Copilot). They do, however, occasionally use LLMs as a search engine for unqualified questions (I.e. where they identify that there are unknown unknowns). Is my anecdotal experience representative of reality? If not, I’d love to hear peoples’ workflows (especially the historical high performers)
I’m a staff-level FE for 8 yrs. My workflow since 2024:
1. Exploration: LLM first, docs second—cuts discovery time by ~3×.
2. Boilerplate: AI generates, I refactor on the spot; never merged blindly.
3. CR: bot leaves a first-pass checklist, humans focus on architecture.
4. Legacy spelunking: 200k-context summary + mermaid call-graph.
5. Rule of three: AI writes glue, I write core, tests cover both.
Result: 30-40% more features shipped per quarter without quality drop.
Its great to get back into programming when you have become rusty because of managerial duties.
I use it as a pair programmer some of the time, especially in areas that I'm not super knowledgeable about, like arcane configuration details. I just use the ChatGPT app with cut and paste; I have not yet graduated to AI IDE tools. I'm thinking about it though.
ITT: "Juniors" thinking they are "Seniors" (which by itself are almost useless terms)
I agree the label often means different things to different people, but ultimately I’m curious to determine if my anecdotal experience of AI being used very sparingly by the top 10% of performers is characteristic of the behavior more broadly, or just an anomaly in my circles. Do you have any thoughts on this?