My AI Adoption Journey

> it just polls you when it needs clarification

I think anyone who has worked on a serious software project would say, this means it would be polling you constantly.

Even if we posit that an LLM is equivalent to a human, humans constantly clarify requirements/architecture. IMO on both of those fronts the correct path often reveals itself over time, rather than being knowable from the start.

So in this scenario it seems like you'd be dealing with constant pings and need to really make sure you're understanding of the project is growing with the LLM's development efforts as well.

To me this seems like the best-case of the current technology, the models have been getting better and better at doing what you tell it in small chunks but you still need to be deciding what it should be doing. These chunks don't feel as though they're getting bigger unless you're willing to accept slop.

I mostly mentioned Claude Code because it's what Mitchell first tried according to his post, and it's what I personally use. From what I hear Codex is pretty comparable; it has a lot of fans. There are definitely some differences and strengths and weaknesses of both the CLIs and the underlying LLMs that others who use more than one tool might want to weight in on, but they're all fairly comparable. (Although, we'll see how the new models released from Anthropic and OpenAI today stack up.) Codex and Gemini CLI are basically Claude Code clones with different LLMs behind them, after all.

I wonder too. It might be that progress on the underlying models is going to plateau, or it might be that we haven't yet reached what in retrospect will be the biggest inflection point. Technological developments can seem to make sense in hindsight as a story of continuous progress when the dust has settled and we can write and tell the history, but when you go back and look at the full range of voices in the historical sources you realize just how deeply nothing was clear to anyone at all at the time it was happening because everyone was hurtling into the unknown future with a fog of war in front of them. In 1910 I'd say it would have been perfectly reasonable to predict airplanes would remain a terrifying curiosity reserved for daredevils only (and people did); or conversely, in the 1960s a lot of commentators thought that the future of passenger air travel in the 70s and 80s would be supersonic jets. I keep this in mind and don't really pay too much attention to over-confident predictions about the technological future.

LLMs are not for me. My position is that the advantage we humans have over the rest of the natural world, is our minds. Our ability to think, create and express ideas is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Once we give that over to "thinking" machines, we weaken ourselves, both individually and as a species.

That said, I've given it a go. I used zed, which I think is a pretty great tool. I bought a pro subscription and used the built in agent with Claude Sonnet 4.x and Opus. I'm a Rails developer in my day job, and, like MitchellH and many others, found out fairly quickly that tasks for the LLM need to be quite specific and discrete. The agent is great a renames and minor refactors, but my preferred use of the agent was to get it to write RSpec tests once I'd written something like a controller or service object.

And generally, the LLM agent does a pretty great job of this.

But here's the rub: I found that I was losing the ability to write rspec.

I went to do it manually and found myself trying to remember API calls and approaches required to write some specs. The feeling of skill leaving me was quite sobering and marked my abandonment of LLMs and Zed, and my return to neovim, agent-free.

The thing is, this is a common experience generally. If you don't use it, you lose it. It applies to all things: fitness, language (natural or otherwise), skills of all kinds. Why should it not apply to thinking itself.

Now you may write me and my experience off as that of a lesser mind, and that you won't have such a problem. You've been doing it so long that it's "hard-wired in" by now. Perhaps.

It's in our nature to take the path of least resistance, to seek ease and convenience at every turn. We've certainly given away our privacy and anonymity so that we can pay for things with our phones and send email for "free".

LLMs are the ultimate convenience. A peer or slave mind that we can use to do our thinking and our work for us. Some believe that the LLM represents a local maxima, that the approach can't get much better. I dunno, but as AI improves, we will hand over more and more thinking and work to it. To do otherwise would be to go against our very nature and every other choice we've made so far.

But it's not for me. I'm no MitchellH, and I'm probably better off performing the mundane activities of my work, as well as the creative ones, so as to preserve my hard-won knowledge and skills.

YMMV

I'll leave off with the quote that resonates the most with me as I contemplate AI:-

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about." -- Agent Smith "The Matrix"

With so much noise in the AI world and constant model updates (just today GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 were announced), this was a really refreshing read. It’s easy to relate to his phased approach to finding real value in tooling and not just hype. There are solid insights and practical tips here. I’m increasingly convinced that the best way not to get overwhelmed is to set clear expectations for what you want to achieve with AI and tailor how you use it to work for you, rather than trying to chase every new headline. Very refreshing.