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My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

141–150 of 420 posts

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#141
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok? You still have to read the code.

You're missing the point. The point is that reading the code is more time consuming than writing it, and has always been thus. Having a machine that can generate code 100x faster, but which you have to read carefully to make sure it hasn't gone off the rails, is not an asset. It is a liability.

Tell that to Mitchell Hashimoto.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#142
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…

I'm trying to track down a GCC miscompilation right now ;)

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#143
post #119

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.

You really shouldn't use the absolute hellscape of churn that is web dev as an example of broader industry trends. No other sub-field of tech is foolish enough to chase hype and new tools the way web dev is.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#144
post #14
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get it. What's the relation between Mitchell being a "better" developer than most of us (and better is always relative, but that's another story) and getting value out of AI? That's like saying Bezos is a way better businessman than you, so you should really hear his tips about becoming a billionaire. No sense (because what works for him probably doesn't work for you) Tons of respect for Mitchell. I think you a…

Maybe you disagree with it, but it seems like a pretty straightforward argument: A lot of us dismiss AI because "it can't be trusted to do as good a job as me". The OP is arguing that someone, who can do better than most of us, disagrees with this line of thinking. And if we have respect for his abilities, and recognize them as better than our own, we should perhaps re-assess our own rationale in dismissing the utili…

No, it doesn't work that way. I don't know if Mitchell is a better programmer than me, but let's say he is for the sake of argument. That doesn't make him a god to whom I must listen. He's just a guy, and he can be wrong about things. I'm glad he's apparently finding value here, but the cold hard reality is that I have tried the tools and they don't provide value to me. And between another practicioner's opinion and my own, I value my own more.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#145
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agen…

> 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.

They probably aren't really. At least in orgs I worked at, writing the code wasn't usually the bottleneck. It was in retrospect, 'context' engineering, waiting for the decision to get made, making some change and finding it breaks some assumption that was being made elsewhere but wasn't in the ticket, waiting for other stakeholders to insert their piece of the context, waiting for $VENDOR to reply about why their service is/isn't doing X anymore, discovering that $VENDOR_A's stage environment (that your stage environment is testing against for the integration) does $Z when $VENDOR_B_C_D don't do that, etc.

The ecosystem as a whole has to shift for this to work.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#146
post #133

So does everyone just run with giving full permissions on Claude code these days? It seems like I’m constantly coming back to CC to validate that it’s not running some bash that’s going to nuke my system. I would love to be able to fully step away but it feels like I can’t.

Honest question, when was the last time you caught it trying to use a command that was going to "nuke your system"?

Maybe once a month

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#147
> Context switching is very expensive. In order to remain efficient, I found that it was my job as a human to be in control of when I interrupt the agent, not the other way around. Don't let the agent notify you.

This I have found to be important too.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#148

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…

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…

It reminds me a lot of 3D Printing tbh. Watching all these cool DIY 3d printing kits evolve over years, I remember a few times I'd checked on costs to build a DIY one. They kept coming down, and down, and then around the same time as "Build a 3d printer for $200 (some assembly required)!" The Bambu X1C was announced/released, for a bit over a grand iirc? And its whole selling point was that it was fast and worked, out of the box. And so I bought one and made a bunch of random one-off-things that solved _my_ specific problem, the way I wanted it solved. Mostly in the form of very specific adapter plates that I could quickly iterate on and random house 'wouldn't it be nice if' things.

That's kind of where AI-agent-coding is now too, though... software is more flexible.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#149

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…

Isn’t there something off about calling predictions about the future, that aren’t possible with current tech, hype? Like people predicted AI agents would be this huge change, they were called hype since earlier models were so unreliable, and now they are mostly right as ai agents work like a mid level engineer. And clearly super human in some areas.

> ai agents work like a mid level engineer

They do not.

> And clearly super human in some areas.

Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology".

Lay off the hype pills.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#150
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So read the code.

Cool, code review continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in our org, with or without agentic AI pumping out 1k LOC per hour.

For me, AI is the best for code research and review

Since some team members started using AI without care, I did create bunch of agents/skills/commands and custom scripts for claude code. For each PR, it collects changes by git log/diff, read PR data and spin bunch of specialized agents to check code style, architecture, security, performance, and bugs. Each agent armed with necessary requirement documents, including security compliance files. False positives are rare, but it still misses some problems. No PR with ai generated code passes it. If AI did not find any problems, I do manual review.

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