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.
I'm 50% sure this was written by an LLM.
Its great to get back into programming when you have become rusty because of managerial duties.
I am a lead software engineer with 12 years of experience and a recent master's degree in cybersecurity.
I use GitHub CoPilot everyday. I usually limit it to a fancy auto-complete. It's really helpful for repetitive refactor tasks, I just have to go to each line and it updates. This way I still see what's happening, but it is faster than manually making those changes that can't be solved with a find and replace.
Sometimes I fight CoPilot because it will continue to suggest something I do not want to do. In those instances I code faster as to outpace the AI's latency.
Other devs are building MCP servers to help access our tools for AI integration. Devops seems heavy on spec driven and test driven development through AI. The spec driven development looks interesting, but a bit of overhead to get started.
Our company has an AI first directive right now where we're supposed to use AI for everything and see what works. I somewhat disdain it, but it's also fun to have a directive to try new things indiscriminately (using AI). The more I drink the Kool aid, the better it tastes.
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?