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My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

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Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#281

Post by Vinnl »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #86
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…

> Break down sessions into separate clear, actionable tasks. What this misses, of course, is that you can just have the agent do this too. Agent's are great at making project plans, especially if you give them a template to follow.

It sounds to me like the goal there is to spell out everything you don't want the agent to make assumptions about. If you let the agent make the plan, it'll still make those assumptions for you.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#282

Post by munksbeer »

luisgvv wrote: post #127
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 a…

I don't understand why you were letting your code get into such a state just because an agent wrote it? I won't approve such code from a human, and will ask them to change it with suggestions on how. I do the same for code written by claude.

And then I raise the PR and other humans review it, and they won't let me merge crap code.

Is it that a lot of you are working with much lighter weight processes and you're not as strict about what gets merged to main?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#283

Post by munksbeer »

apercu wrote: post #45

I find it interesting that this thread is full of pragmatic posts that seem to honestly reflect the real limits of current Gen-Ai. Versus other threads (here on HN, and especially on places like LinkedIn) where it's "I set up a pipeline and some agents and now I type two sentences and amazing technology comes out in 5 minutes that would have taken 3 devs 6 months to do".

I never see those type of posts. Maybe I'm immune and ignoring them.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#284

Post by jplusequalt »

probably_wrong wrote: post #279
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…

>$15.98 * 1.5 * 20 = $497,40 a month

Are people seriously dropping hundreds of dollars a month on these products to get their work done?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#285

Post by bayindirh »

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 and processors are deterministic by design. LLMs are non-deterministic by design.

It's not apples vs. oranges. They are literally opposite of each other.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#286

Post by signatoremo »

sampullman wrote: post #242
LiamPowell wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that LLMs are at a point today where we can blindly trust their outputs in most applications, I just don't think that 100% correct output is necessarily a requirement for that. What it needs to be is correct often enough that the cost of reviewing the output far outweighs the average cost of any errors in the output, just like with a compiler. This even applies to human written code and human mistakes…

If natural language is used to specify work to the LLM, how can the output ever be trusted? You'll always need to make sure the program does what you want, rather than what you said.

You trust your natural language instructions thousand times a day. If you ask for a large black coffee, you can trust that is more or less what you’ll get. Occasionally you may get something so atrocious that you don’t dare to drink, but generally speaking you trust the coffee shop knows what you want. It you insist on a specific amount of coffee brewed at a specific temperature, however, you need tools to measure.

AI tools are similar. You can trust them because they are good enough, and you need a way (testing) to make sure what is produced meet your specific requirements. Of course they may fail for you, doesn’t mean they aren’t useful in other cases.

All of that is simply common sense.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#287

Post by idopmstuff »

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.

This just isn't true any more. Outside of work, my most common use case for LLMs is probably cooking. I used to frequently second guess them, but no longer - in my experience SOTA models are totally reliable for producing good recipes.

I recognize that at a higher level we're still talking about probabilistic recipe generation vs. deterministic compiler output, but at this point it's nonetheless just inaccurate to act as though LLMs can't be trusted with simple (e.g. potato soup recipe) tasks.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#288

Post by noisy_boy »

I still use the chatbot but like to do it outside-in. Provide what I need, and instruct it to not write any code except the api (signatures of classes, interfaces, hierarchy, essential methods etc). We keep iterating about this until it looks good - still no real code. Then I ask it to do a fresh review of the broad outline, any issues it foresees etc. Then I ask it to write some demonstrator test cases to see how ergonomic and testable the code is - we fine tune the apis but nothing is fleshed out yet. Once this is done, we are done with the most time consuming phase.

After that is basically just asking it to flesh out the layers starting from zero dependencies to arriving at the top of the castle. Even if we have any complexities within the pieces or the implementation is not exactly as per my liking, the issues are localised - I can dive in and handle it myself (most of the time, I don't need to).

I feel like this approach works very well for me having a mental model of how things are connected because the most of the time I spent was spent on that model.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#289

Post by WA »

direwolf20 wrote: post #267
pixl97 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>makes the human race seem quite easily hackable. If the human race were not hackable then society would not exist, we'd be the unchanging crocodiles of the last few hundred million years. Have you ever found yourself speaking a meme? Had a catchy toon repeating in your head? Started spouting nation state level propaganda? Found yourself in crowd trying to burn a witch at the stake? Hacking the flow of human thought…

How do I hack the human population to give me money, and simultaneously, hack law enforcement to not arrest me?

> How do I hack the human population to give me money

Make something popular or become famous.

> hack law enforcement to not arrest me

Don't become famous with illegal stuff.

The hack is that we live in a society that makes people think they need a lot of money and at the same time allows individuals to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and influence and many people being ok with that.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#290

Post by i_love_retros »

How much does it cost per day to have all these agents running on your computer?

Is your company paying for it or you?

What is your process of the agent writes a piece of code, let's say a really complex recursive function, and you aren't confident you could have come up with the same solution? Do you still submit it?

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