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My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

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Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#121

Post by noosphr »

sunshinekitty wrote: post #118
noosphr wrote: post #113

I've been building systems like what the OP is using since gpt3 came out. This is the honeymoon phase. You're learning the ins and outs of the specific model you're using and becoming more productive. It's magical. Nothing can stop you. Then you might not be improving as fast as you did at the start, but things are getting better every day. Or maybe every week. But it's heaps better than doing it by hand because you…

> I've been building systems like what the OP is using since pgt3 came out. OP is also a founder of Hashicorp, so.. lol. > This is the honeymoon phase. No offense but you come across as if you didn’t read the article.

You come across as if you didn't read my post.

I'll wait for OP to move their workflow to Claude 7.0 and see if they still feel as bullish on AI tools.

People who are learning a new AI tool for the first time don't realzie that they are just learning quirks of the tool and underlying and not skills that generalize. It's not until you've done it a few times that you realzie you've wasted more than 80% of your time on a model that is completely useless and will be sunset in 6 months.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#123

Post by chrysoprace »

re-thc wrote: post #119
chrysoprace wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for a lot of people the turn off is the constant churn and the hype cycle. For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA. Are we still using MCPs or are we using Skills now? Not long ago you had to know MCP or you'd be left behind and you definitely need to know MCP UI or you'll be left behind. I think. It just becomes really tiring, especi…

> For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA That hasn’t been tech for a long time. Frontend has been changing forever. React and friends have new releases all the time. Node has new package managers and even Deno and Bun. AWS keeps changing things.

There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though, and don't bottleneck your capacity to get things done.

To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since 16.8.0 (introduction of hooks) and that was 7 years ago. Yes there are new hooks, but they typically build on older concepts. AWS hasn't deprecated any of our existing services at work (besides maybe a MySQL version becoming EOL) in the last 4 years that I've worked at my current company.

While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.

I don't need to keep obsessing over whether Codex or Claude have a 1 point lead in a gamed benchmark test so long as I'm still able to ship features without a lot of churn.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#124

Post by zamadatix »

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…

Should AI tools use memory safe tabs or spaces for indentation? :)

It is a shame it's become such a polarized topic. Things which actually work fine get immediately bashed by large crowds at the same time things that are really not there get voted to the moon by extremely eager folks. A few years from now I expect I'll be thinking "man, there was some really good stuff I missed out on because the discussions about it were so polarized at the time. I'm glad that has cleared up significantly!"

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#125

Post by moregrist »

keyle wrote: post #79
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…

Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted s…

> When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ...

Any time I’m doing serious optimization or knee-deep in debugging something where the bug emerged at -O2 but not at -O0.

Sometimes just for fun to see what the compiler is doing in its optimization passes.

You severely limit what you can do and what you can learn if you never peek underneath.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#126

Post by LiamPowell »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #116
keyle wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted s…

"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of…

> Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career.

In my experience this isn't true. People just assume their code is wrong and mess with it until they inadvertently do something that works around the bug. I've personally reported 17 bugs in GCC over the last 2 years and there are currently 1241 open wrong-code bugs.

Here's an example of a simple to understand bug (not mine) in the C frontend that has existed since GCC 4.7: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=105180

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#127

Post by luisgvv »

henry_bone wrote: post #78

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…

I was using it the same way you just described but for C# and Angular and you're spot on. It feels amazing not having to memorize APIs and just let the AI even do code coverage near to 100%, however at some point I began noticing 2 things:

- When tests didn't work I had to check what was going on and the LLMs do cheat a lot with Volkswagen tests, so that began to make me skeptic even of what is being written by the agents

- When things were broken, spaghetti and awful code tends to be written in an obnoxius way it's beyond repairable and made me wish I had done it from scratch.

Thankfully I just tried using agents for tests and not for the actual code, but it makes me think a lot if "vibe coding" really produces quality work.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#128

Post by tehlike »

smj-edison wrote: post #101
underdeserver wrote: post #33

> At a bare minimum, the agent must have the ability to: read files, execute programs, and make HTTP requests. That's one very short step removed from Simon Willison's lethal trifecta.

I will say one thing Claude does is it doesn't run a command until you approve it, and you can choose between a one-time approval and always allowing a command's pattern. I usually approve the simple commands like `zig build test`, since I'm not particularly worried about the test harness. I believe it also scopes file reading by default to the current directory.

A lot of people run the claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#129

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

AloysB wrote: post #112
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed over it, and didn’t find any discussion of: - Pull requests - Merge requests - Code review I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Are SWE supposed to move away from code review, one of the core activities for the profession? Code review is as fundamental for SWE as double entry is for accounting. Yes, we know that functional code can get generated at incredible speeds. Yes, we know that apps and what not can b…

Give it a read, he mentions briefly how he uses for PR triages and resolving GH issues. He doesn't go in details, but there is a bit: > Issue and PR triage/review. Agents are good at using gh (GitHub CLI), so I manually scripted a quick way to spin up a bunch in parallel to triage issues. I would NOT allow agents to respond, I just wanted reports the next day to try to guide me towards high value or low effort tasks.…

Okay I think this somewhat answers my question. Is this individual a solo developer? “Triaging GitHub issues” sounds a bit like open source solo developer.

Guess I’m just desperate for an article about how organizations are actually speeding up development using agentic AI. Like very practical articles about how existing development processes have been adjusted to facilitate agentic AI.

I remain unconvinced that agentic AI scales beyond solo development, where the individual is liable for the output of the agents. More precisely, I can use agentic AI to write my code, but at the end of the day when I submit it to my org it’s my responsibility to understand it, and guarantee (according to my personal expertise) its security and reliability.

Conversely, I would fire (read: reprimand) someone so fast if I found out they submitted code that created a vulnerability that they would have reasonably caught if they weren’t being reckless with code submission speed, LLM or not.

AI will not revolutionize SWE until it revolutionizes our processes. It will definitely speed us up (I have definitely become faster), but faster != revolution.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#130

Post by chii »

bandrami wrote: post #107
sho_hn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually an aspect of using AI tools I really enjoy: Forming an educated intuition about what the tool is good at, and tastefully framing and scoping the tasks I give it to get better results. It cognitively feels very similar to other classic programming activities, like modularization at any level from architecture to code units/functions, thoughtfully choosing how to lay out and chunk things. It's always b…

"Become better at intuiting the behavior of this non-deterministic black box oracle maintained by a third party" just isn't a strong professional development sell for me, personally. If the future of writing software is chasing what a model trainer has done with no ability to actually change that myself I don't think that's going to be interesting to nearly as many people.

Whether it's interesting or not is irrelevant to whether it produces usable output that could be economically valuable.
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