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

271–280 of 420 posts

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#271

Post by rhubarbtree »

Applejinx wrote: post #244
rhubarbtree wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning by analogy is usually a bad idea, and nowhere is this worse than talking about software development. It’s just not analogous to architecture, or cooking, or engineering. Software development is just its own thing. So you can’t use analogy to get yourself anywhere with a hint of rigour. The problem is, AI is generating code that may be buggy, insecure, and unmaintainable. We have as a community spent decades…

Now then, Moltbook is a pathological case. Either it remains a pathological case or our whole technological world is gonna stumble HARD as all the fundamental things collapse. I prefer to think Moltbook is a pathological case and unrepresentative, but I've also been rethinking a sort of game idea from computer-based to entirely paper/card based (tariffs be damned) specifically for this reason. I wish to make things t…

Just the first system that was coded by AI could think of. Note this is unrelated to the fact that its users are LLMs - the problem was in the development of Moltbook itself.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#272

Post by latexr »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #260
latexr wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s another dishonest comparison. Predictability is not the same as precision. You don’t need to be millimetric when shovelling dirt at a construction site. But you do need to do it when conducting brain surgery. Context matters.

Sure. If you’re racing your runway to go from 0 to 100 users you’d reach for a different set of tools than if you’re contributing to postgres. In other words I agree completely with you but these new tools open up new possibilities. We have historically not had super-shovels so we’ve had to shovel all the things no matter how giant or important they are.

> these new tools open up new possibilities.

I’m not disputing that. What I’m criticising is the argument from my original parent post of comparing it to things which are fundamentally different, but making it look equivalent as a justification against criticism.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#273

Post by dcre »

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.

I think this is underrating the role of intuition in working effectively with deterministic but very complex software systems like operating systems and compilers. Determinism is a red herring.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#274

Post by hollowturtle »

wiether wrote: post #255
hollowturtle wrote: post #226

I don't understand how Agents make you feel productive. Single/Multiple agents reading specs, specs often produced with agents itself and iterated over time with human in the loop, a lot of reviewing of giant gibberish specs. Never had a clear spec in my life. Then all the dancing for this apperantly new paradigm, of not reviewing code but verifying behaviour, and so many other things. All of this to me is a total UN…

> Never had a clear spec in my life. To me part of our job has always been about translating garbage/missing specs in something actionnable. Working with agents don't change this and that's why until PM/business people are able to come up with actual specs, they'll still need their translators. Furthermore, it's not because the global spec is garbage that you, as a dev, won't come up with clear specs to solve technic…

With "Never had a clear spec in my life" what I mean is also that I don't how something should come out till I'm actually doing it. Writing code for me lead to discovery, I don't know what to produce till I see it in the wrapping context, like what a function should accept, for example a ref or a copy. Only at that point I have the proper intuition to make a decision that has to be supported long term. I don't want cheap code now I want a solit feature working tomorrow and not touching it for a long a time hopefully

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#275

Post by barrenko »

allworms wrote: post #95
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…

> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... > When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? Sure, because those are categorically different. You are describing shortcuts of two classes: boilerplat…

Architects still need to learn to draw manually quite well to pass exams and stuff.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#276

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #129
AloysB wrote: 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…

I had a bit of an adjustment of my beliefs since writing these comments. My current take:

  - AI is revolutionizing how individuals work
  - It is not clear yet how AI can revolutionize how organizations work (even SWE)

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#277

Post by IhateAI »

dotancohen wrote: post #117
IhateAI wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So you have a hobby. I have a profession. Therefore I evaluate new tools. Agents coding I've introduced into my auxiliary tool forgings (one-off bash scripts) and personal projects, and I'm just now comfortable to introduce into my professional work. But I still evaluate every line.

"auxiliary tool forgings" You aren't a serious person.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#278

Post by dotancohen »

IhateAI wrote: post #277
dotancohen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have a hobby. I have a profession. Therefore I evaluate new tools. Agents coding I've introduced into my auxiliary tool forgings (one-off bash scripts) and personal projects, and I'm just now comfortable to introduce into my professional work. But I still evaluate every line.

"auxiliary tool forgings" You aren't a serious person.

I may not be a serious person, but I am a serious professional.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#279

Post by probably_wrong »

davidw wrote: post #36

This seems like a pretty reasonable approach that charts a course between skepticism and "it's a miracle". I wonder how much all this costs on a monthly basis?

The comment by user senko [1] links to a post from this same author with an example for a specific coding session that costs $15.98 for 8 hours of work. The example in this post talks about leaving agents running overnight, in which case I'd guess "twice that amount" would be a reasonable approximation.

Or if we assume that the OP can only do 4 hours per sitting (mentioned in the other post) and 8 hours of overnight agents then it would come down to $15.98 * 1.5 * 20 = $497,40 a month (without weekends).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905872

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#280

Post by throw10920 »

LiamPowell wrote: post #126
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…

> 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…

> I've personally reported 17 bugs in GCC over the last 2 years

You are an extreme outlier. I know about two dozen people who work with C(++) and not a single one of them has ever told me that they've found a compiler bug when we've talked about coding and debugging - it's been exclusively them describing PEBCAK.

Post reply on HN