Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

I've been working on a personal project recently, rewriting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit. The main work is translating the UI templates into idiomatic SvelteKit while maintaining the original styling. This includes things like using semantic HTML instead of div-spamming, not wrapping divs in divs in divs, and replacing bootstrap with minimal tailwind. It also includes some logic refactors, to maintain the original functionality but rewritten to avoid years of code debt. Things like replacing templates using boolean flags for multiple views with composable Svelte components.

I've had a fairly steady process for doing this: look at each route defined in Django, build out my `+page.server.ts`, and then split each major section of the page into a Svelte component with a matching Storybook story. It takes a lot of time to do this, since I have to ensure I'm not just copying the template but rather recreating it in a more idiomatic style.

This kind of work seems like a great use case for AI assisted programming, but I've failed to use it effectively. At most, I can only get Claude Code to recreate some slightly less spaghetti code in Svelte. Simple prompting just isn't able to get AI's code quality within 90% of what I'd write by hand. Ideally, AI could get it's code to something I could review manually in 15-20 minutes, which would massively speed up the time spent on this project (right now it takes me 1-2 hours to properly translate a route).

Do you guys have tips or suggestions on how to improve my efficiency and code quality with AI?