Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 420 posts

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#51

Post by simonw »

jorvi wrote: post #31
vonneumannstan wrote: post #3

For the AI skeptics reading this, there is an overwhelming probability that Mitchell is a better developer than you. If he gets value out of these tools you should think about why you can't.

The AI skeptics instead stick to hard data, which so far shows a 19% reduction in productivity when using AI.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

> 1) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers. Clarification: We do not claim that our developers or repositories represent a majority or plurality of software development work.

> 2) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not speed up individuals or groups in domains other than software development. Clarification: We only study software development.

> 3) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting. Clarification: Progress is difficult to predict, and there has been substantial AI progress over the past five years [3].

> 4) We do NOT provide evidence that there are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting. Clarification: Cursor does not sample many tokens from LLMs, it may not use optimal prompting/scaffolding, and domain/repository-specific training/finetuning/few-shot learning could yield positive speedup.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#52

Post by keyle »

It's amusing how everyone seems to be going through the same journey.

I do run multiple models at once now. On different parts of the code base.

I focus solely on the less boring tasks for myself and outsource all of the slam dunk and then review. Often use another model to validate the previous models work while doing so myself.

I do git reset still quite often but I find more ways to not get to that point by knowing the tools better and better.

Autocompleting our brains! What a crazy time.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#53

Post by libraryofbabel »

This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good enough that they could incorporate AI agents into their workflows.

It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. I understand the reasons, but I wish there had been a smoother path to this future. The early LLMs like GPT-3 could sort of code enough for it to look like there was a lot of potential, and so there was a lot of hype to drum up investment and a lot of promises made that weren't really viable with the tech as it was then. This created a large number of AI skeptics (of whom I was one, for a while) and a whole bunch of cynicism and suspicion and resistance amongst a large swathe of developers. But could it have been different? It seems a lot of transformative new tech is fated to evolve this way. Early aircraft were extremely unreliable and dangerous and not yet worthy of the promises being made about them, but eventually with enough evolution and lessons learned we got the Douglas DC-3, and then in the end the 747.

If you're a developer who still doesn't believe that AI tools are useful, I would recommend you go read Mitchell's post, and give Claude Code a trial run like he did. Try and forget about the annoying hype and the vibe-coding influencers and the noise and just treat it like any new tool you might put through its paces. There are many important conversations about AI to be had, it has plenty of downsides, but a proper discussion begins with close engagement with the tools.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#54

Post by latchkey »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #38

There are so many stories about how people use agentic AI but they rarely post how much they spend. Before I can even consider it, I need to know how it will cost me per month. I'm currently using one pro subscription and it's already quite expensive for me. What are people doing, burning hundreds of dollars per month? Do they also evaluate how much value they get out of it?

I quickly run out of the JetBrains AI 35 monthly credits for $300/yr and spending an additional $5-10/day on top of that, mostly for Claude.

I just recently added in Codex, since it comes with my $20/mo subscription to GPT and that's lowering my Claude credit usage significantly... until I hit those limits at some point.

2012 + 300 + 5~200... so about $1500-$1600/year.

It is 100% worth it for what I'm building right now, but my fear is that I'll take a break from coding and then I'm paying for something I'm not using with the subscriptions.

I'd prefer to move to a model where I'm paying for compute time as I use it, instead of worrying about tokens/credits.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#55

Post by cal_dent »

Just wanted to say that was a nice and very grounded write up; and as a result very informative. Thank you. More stuff like this is a breath of fresh air in a landscape that has veered into hyperbole territory both in the for and against ai sides

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#56

Post by whatifnomoney »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #53

This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good enough that they could incorporate AI agents into their workflows. It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. I understand the reasons…

[dead]

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#58

Post by zubspace »

It's so sad that we're the ones who have to tell the agent how to improve by extending agent.md or whatever. I constantly have to tell it what I don't like or what can be improved or need to request clarifications or alternative solutions.

This is what's so annoying about it. It's like a child that does the same errors again and again.

But couldn't it adjust itself with the goal of reducing the error bit by bit? Wouldn't this lead to the ultimate agent who can read your mind? That would be awesome.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#60

Post by cactusplant7374 »

zubspace wrote: post #58

It's so sad that we're the ones who have to tell the agent how to improve by extending agent.md or whatever. I constantly have to tell it what I don't like or what can be improved or need to request clarifications or alternative solutions. This is what's so annoying about it. It's like a child that does the same errors again and again. But couldn't it adjust itself with the goal of reducing the error bit by bit? Woul…

It is not a mind reader. I enjoy giving it feedback because it shows I am in charge of the engineering.

I also love using it for research for upcoming features. Research + pick a solution + implement. It happens so fast.

Post reply on HN