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mmaunderyesterday at 2:48 AM1 replyview on HN

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.


Replies

2god3yesterday at 2:59 AM

You're not really answering the question are you?

Your answer is to play with it. Cool. But why cant you and others put together a proper guide lol? It cant be that hard.

Go ahead and do it - it'll challenge the Anti-AI posters you are referencing. I and others want to see that debate.

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