I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#1

Post by louwrentius » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
louwrentius.com

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#2

Post by foxyv » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

I've noticed that you can either move very fast with AI, or very slow. Moving fast, you place a lot of trust in the agent and let it proceed and create something very quickly that works at a surface level and that you don't understand at all. Moving slow you take the time to ask questions and understand every part of the application and learn more about how to code it yourself and make changes as necessary.

One thing I've noticed is, that coding manually is exponentially more stressful than the slow AI approach. I'm not going any faster than I normally would, but the burnout doesn't show up on the fifth day of the week. The hyper-focus is kind of fun but utterly exhausting.

With the fast approach I can create impressive demos and POCs that are nowhere near ready for production. But sometimes that's exactly what I need.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#3

Post by hmokiguess » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

Both things can be true.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#4

Post by dd8601fn » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

foxyv wrote: post #2

I've noticed that you can either move very fast with AI, or very slow. Moving fast, you place a lot of trust in the agent and let it proceed and create something very quickly that works at a surface level and that you don't understand at all. Moving slow you take the time to ask questions and understand every part of the application and learn more about how to code it yourself and make changes as necessary. One thing…

I just spent multiple evenings talking through a small data model. With the massive number of misses the model had, I can’t imagine how bad it would have been if I had let it yolo the first design of its choice, to build on.

The requirements didn’t really change, opus just couldn’t see all the real world potential issues with its various suggestions.

But it was helpful for me to talk it out. So I guess it fell in the (very) slow category of productive use.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#5

Post by xyzsparetimexyz » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

I think it's very productive in areas that aren't economically impactful. Reverse engineering old windows games for example. Doing absurd ports between languages.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#6

Post by solarkraft » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

foxyv wrote: post #2

I've noticed that you can either move very fast with AI, or very slow. Moving fast, you place a lot of trust in the agent and let it proceed and create something very quickly that works at a surface level and that you don't understand at all. Moving slow you take the time to ask questions and understand every part of the application and learn more about how to code it yourself and make changes as necessary. One thing…

I love that you can mix these approaches. It lets me very quickly get a working prototype and then I can focus on optimizing the areas I care about / are having issues.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#7

Post by zuzululu » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

tired of this one dimensional articles that paint a wide brush, there are wide variety of AI uses and it absolutely has a productivity multiplying effect.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#8

Post by vadansky » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

foxyv wrote: post #2

I've noticed that you can either move very fast with AI, or very slow. Moving fast, you place a lot of trust in the agent and let it proceed and create something very quickly that works at a surface level and that you don't understand at all. Moving slow you take the time to ask questions and understand every part of the application and learn more about how to code it yourself and make changes as necessary. One thing…

This, I'm working on a game engine as a hobby project. I can do one "big" feature over a weekend, most of it including designing and manual testing that it's working as expected, but then it takes me 2 weekends to break up the changes into smaller commits using jj, which also gives me the chance to review and understand the code myself. So it's a weird mix of fast and slow, but I think I've grown to prefer reviewing over writing so it works for a hobby project.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#9

Post by aogaili » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN.

At least the author admit he is biased..

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#10

Post by deadbabe » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

foxyv wrote: post #2

I've noticed that you can either move very fast with AI, or very slow. Moving fast, you place a lot of trust in the agent and let it proceed and create something very quickly that works at a surface level and that you don't understand at all. Moving slow you take the time to ask questions and understand every part of the application and learn more about how to code it yourself and make changes as necessary. One thing…

I think almost anything you can build autonomously with a fully independent AI agent, you can build far better with the slow AI approach. It is a good trade off between the super fast agentic approach and the full manual approach, and leaves you with a codebase you can still reason about and find ways to improve.

Also, once you build something with slow AI, it becomes more practical to actually rewrite it by hand quickly and refactor it in a way that makes more sense for humans. It’s “humanwashing” the code.