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My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

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Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#151

Post by bilbo0s »

blibble wrote: post #111
throwup238 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Engineers are an entirely distinct set of roles that among other things validate the plan in its totality, not only the "new" 1/5th. Our job spans both of these. Where this analogy breaks down is that the work you’re describing is done by Professional Engineers that have strict licensing and are (criminally) liable for the end result of the plans they approve. That is an entirely different role from the army of civ…

> Where this analogy breaks down is that the work you’re describing is done by Professional Engineers that have strict licensing and are (criminally) liable for the end result of the plans they approve. there are plenty of software engineers that work in regulated industries, with individual licensing, criminal liability, and the ability to be struck off and banned from the industry by the regulator ... such as mysel…

Sure.

But no one stops you from writing software again.

It's not that PE's can't design or review buildings in whatever city the egregious failure happened.

It's that PE's can't design or review buildings at all in any city after an egregious failure.

It's not that PE's can't design or review hospital building designs because one of their hospital designs went so egregiously sideways.

It's that PE's can't design or review any building for any use because their design went so egregiously sideways.

I work in an FDA regulated software area. I need 510k approval and the whole nine. But if I can't write regulated medical or dental software anymore, I just pay my fine and/or serve my punishment and go sling React/JS/web crap or become a TF/PyTorch monkey. No one stops me. Consequences for me messing up are far less severe than the consequences for a PE messing up. I can still write software because, in the end, I was never an "engineer" in that hard sense of the word.

Same is true of any software developer. Or any unlicensed area of "engineering" for that matter. We're only playing at being "engineers" with the proverbial "monopoly money". We lose? Well, no real biggie.

PE's agree to hang a sword of damocles over their own heads for the lifetime of the bridge or building they design. That's a whole different ball game.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#152

Post by linuxrocks123 »

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…

I'll try it out when it's something I can run locally. I do not pay for subscriptions for software; I do not pay for services as software substitutes; and, I do not rely on things that run on computers I don't control for anything important.

Whether or not LLM coding AIs are useful, they certainly qualifies as "important," because adopting one is disruptive enough that getting rid of it after adopting it would be disruptive as well. I'm not signing on to that if I need to pay a recurring fee for it and/or need to rely on some company deciding to continue maintaining a cloud server running it in perpetuity.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#153

Post by jen729w »

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…

> Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup.

Because there isn’t a canonical recipe for potato soup.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#154

Post by andai »

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…

This is obviously besides the point but I did blindly follow a wiener schnitzel recipe ChatGPT made me and cooked for a whole crew. It turned out great. I think I got lucky though, the next day I absolutely massacred the pancakes.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#155

Post by throwdbaaway »

latchkey wrote: post #54
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. 20 12 + 300 + 5 ~200... so about $1500-$1600/year. It is 100% worth it for what I'm building righ…

Not using Hot Aisle for inference?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#156

Post by andai »

mjr00 wrote: post #8

> Break down sessions into separate clear, actionable tasks. Don't try to "draw the owl" in one mega session. This is the key one I think. At one extreme you can tell an agent "write a for loop that iterates over the variable `numbers` and computes the sum" and they'll do this successfully, but the scope is so small there's not much point in using an LLM. On the other extreme you can tell an agent "make me an app tha…

> the scope is so small there's not much point in using an LLM

Actually that's how I did most of my work last year. I was annoyed by existing tools so I made one that can be used interactively.

It has full context (I usually work on small codebases), and can make an arbitrary number of edits to an arbitrary number of files in a single LLM round trip.

For such "mechanical" changes, you can use the cheapest/fastest model available. This allows you to work interactively and stay in flow.

(In contrast to my previous obsession with the biggest, slowest, most expensive models! You actually want the dumbest one that can do the job.)

I call it "power coding", akin to power armor, or perhaps "coding at the speed of thought". I found that staying actively involved in this way (letting LLM only handle the function level) helped keep my mental model synchronized, whereas if I let it work independently, I'd have to spend more time catching up on what it had done.

I do use both approaches though, just depends on the project, task or mood!

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#157

Post by latchkey »

throwdbaaway wrote: post #155
latchkey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 20 12 + 300 + 5 ~200... so about $1500-$1600/year. It is 100% worth it for what I'm building righ…

Not using Hot Aisle for inference?

We're literally full. Just a few 1x GPUs available right now.

So far, I haven't been happy with any of the smaller coding models, they just don't compare to claude/codex.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#158

Post by Jensson »

jen729w wrote: post #153
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. Because there isn’t a canonical recipe for potato soup.

That is not the issue, any potato soup recipe would be fine, the issue is that it might fetch values from different recipes and give you an abomination.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#159

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

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 value Mitchell describes aligns well with the lack of value I'm getting. He feels that guiding an agent through a task is neither faster nor slower than doing it himself, and there's some tasks he doesn't even try to do with an agent because he knows it won't work, but it's easier to parallelize reviewing agentic work than it is to parallelize direct coding work. That's just not a usage pattern that's valuable to me personally - I rarely find myself in a situation where I have large number of well-scoped programming tasks I need to complete, and it's a fun treat to do myself when I do.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#160

Post by keyle »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #138
keyle wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct, and I believe this is only a matter of time. Over time it has been getting better and will keep doing so.

Maybe. But it's been 3 years and it still isn't good enough to actually trust. That doesn't raise confidence that it will ever get there.

You need to put this revolution in scale with other revolutions.

How long did it take for horses to be super-seeded by cars?

How long did powertool take to become the norm for tradesmen?

This has gone unbelievably fast.

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