Ask HN: Would you use an AI assistant to create pull requests while you sleep?

1 points by narayanahari 328 days ago | 2 comments

I am an engineer and I have a two member engineering team (1 front-end dev and 1 part-time freelancer). We use Cursor and Claude Code heavily to build. Over the past 6 months, we have built 6+ apps and noticed a pattern that AI is great at small, specific coding tasks but struggles with larger ones.

Our workflow always looks like this:

1. Split our tasks into small sub tasks 2. Write a prompt for each sub task 3. Wait for AI to complete 4. Verify 5. Re-prompt if the verification is not meeting our expectations, if it meets our expectations, give the next task

Most of the time is spent waiting and checking progress manually. If I step away from the computer, I lose visibility.

So I am exploring to create, an AI developer assistant that lives in Slack, Discord, and mobile. Developers can assign these small tasks with expected result to the assistant and while they sleep, the assistant picks them up, runs them through tools like Claude Code and creates pull requests. When the team wakes up, they can review PRs or ask for rework even from mobile.

Questions - 1. Would this be useful to your team? 2. What concerns or blockers would you have before trusting an AI assistant like this?

Any feedback on this would help a lot.

PaulHoule 328 days ago |

All I can think of is

https://video.disney.com/watch/sorcerer-s-apprentice-fantasi...

The core thing about AI coding is “sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t”. There are times when I ask an agent to do something and it does a great job, other times when it takes three attempts. There was that time I was struggling with a TypeScript code base where the errors didn’t make sense to either me or the AI but in three days of hacking on it with AI help I whipped the code into shape, understood what was going on, and the AI became able to do application-level tasks (“add a new field to this form”)

I just can’t see an AI coder going 8 hours and making anything that doesn’t take 16 hours to whip into shape.

narayanahari 328 days ago | |

Great feedback. Thanks for sharing. Totally Agree. AI coding is inconsistent today. We are seeing the same thing using Claude and Cursor daily. Some tasks work beautifully but others spiral.

Thats the reason i am thinking this tool is to offload small and well-scoped, low risk tasks that developers usually queue anyway. Things like making tiny UI changes, update some validations, write docs, adding more test cases.

I am thinking of this more of a "overnight helper" than a full dev replacement. If this tool can handle 3-4 tasks while we sleep and open clean PRs thats already 20-30% productivity bump for small teams. The goal is just get the continuous motion to increase productivity.

Some usecases that i am thinking 1. Minor or Major support tickets (update error codes, fix messaging, update validations) 2. Tiny UI changes (Change the text color of dark mode primary buttons to black, add more countries to the list) 3. Fix issues reported by static code analyzers 4. Increase test coverage by adding more UTs on these specific areas.

More of an entry level intern who can help in getting grunt work completed while the devs focus on the important ones.