OT but, the style. The journey. What is it? What does this remind me of?
Flowers for Algernon.
Or at least the first half. I don't wanna see what it looks like when AI capabilities start going in reverse.
But I want to know.
My AI Adoption Journey
191–200 of 420 posts
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#192> 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 mod…
Do you have the tool open sourced somewhere? I have been thinking of using something similar
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#193Earlier 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've never personally found a compiler bug.”
I remember the time I spent hours debugging a feature that worked on Solaris and Windows but failed to produce the right results on SGI. Turns out the SGI C++ compiler silently ignored the `throw` keyword! Just didn’t emit an opcode at all! Or maybe it wrote a NOP.
All I’m saying is, compilers aren’t perfect.
I agree about determinism though. And I mitigate that concern by prompting AI assistants to write code that solves a problem, instead of just asking for a new and potentially different answer every time I execute the app.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#194If the author is here, please could you also confirm you’ve never been paid by any AI company, marketing representative, community programme, in any shape or form?
He explicitly said "I don't work for, invest in, or advise any AI companies." in the article.
But yes, Hashimoto is a high profile CEO/CTO who may well have an indirect, or near-future interest in talking up AI. HN articles extoling the productivity gains of Claude on HN do generally tend to be from older, managerial types (make of that what you will).
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#195If the author is here, please could you also confirm you’ve never been paid by any AI company, marketing representative, community programme, in any shape or form?
I don't think you appreciate how un-bribeable this particular author is, and I don't just mean in a moral sense.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#196Earlier 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…
I'm trying to track down a GCC miscompilation right now ;)
I feel for you :D
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#197This 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…
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!
Maybe not, but we don't allow non-architects to vomit out thousands of diagrams that they cannot review, and that is never reviewed, which are subsequently used in the construction of the house.
Your analogy to s/ware is fatally and irredeemably flawed, because you are comparing the regulated and certification-heavy production of content, which is subsequently double-checked by certified professionals, with an unregulated and non-certified production of content which is never checked by any human.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#198[flagged]
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#199Very much the same experience. But it does not talk much about the project setup and the influence of it on the session success. In the narrow scoped projects it works really well, especially when tests are easy to execute. I found that this approach melts down when facing enterprise software with large repositories and unconventional layouts. Then you need to do a bunch of context management upfront, and verbose instructions for evaluations. But we know what it needs is a refactor thats all.
And the post touches on a next type of a problem, how to plan far ahead of time to utilise agents when you are away. It is a difficult problem but IMO we’re going in a direction of having some sort of shared “templated plans”/workflows and budgeted/throttled task execution to achieve that. It is like you want to give a little world to explore so that it does not stop early, like a little game to play, then you come back in the morning and check how far it went.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#200Earlier 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! Maybe not, but we don't allow non-architects to vomit out thousands of diagrams that they cannot review, and that is never reviewed, which are subsequently used in the construction of the house. Your analogy to s/ware is fatally and irredeemably flawed, because you are comparing…
I don't see a flaw, I think you're just gatekeeping software creation.
Anyone can pick up some CAD software and design a house if they so desire. Is the town going to let you build it without a certified engineer/architect signing off? Fuck no. But we don't lock down CAD software.
And presumably, mission critical software is still going to be stamped off on by a certified engineer of some sort.