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My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

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Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#201

Post by bostik »

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…

Everything more complex than a hello-world has bugs. Compiler bugs are uncommon, but not that uncommon. (I must have debugged a few ICEs in my career, but luckily have had more skilled people to rely on when code generation itself was wrong.)

Compilers aren't even that bad. The stack goes much deeper and during your career you may be (un)lucky enough to find yourself far below compilers: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/developer-debugging...

NB. I've been to vfs/fs depths. A coworker relied on an oscilloscope quite frequently.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#202

Post by adammarples »

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…

If you had that article, would you read it fully before firing off questions?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#203

Post by lelanthran »

snayan wrote: post #200
lelanthran wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

No, we lock down using that output from the CAD software in the real world.

> And presumably, mission critical software is still going to be stamped off on by a certified engineer of some sort.

The "mission critical" qualifier is new to your analogy, but is irrelevant anyway - the analogy breaks because, while you can do what you like with CAD software on your own PC, that output never gets used outside of your PC without careful and multiple levels of review, while in the s/ware case, there is no review.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#205

Post by awesan »

I'm kind of on the same journey, a bit less far along. One thing I have observed is that I am constantly running out of tokens in claude. I guess this is not an issue for a wealthy person like Mitchell but it does significantly hamper my ability to experiment.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#206

Post by mattmanser »

bthornbury wrote: post #99
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed over it, and didn’t find any discussion of: - Pull requests - Merge requests - Code review I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Are SWE supposed to move away from code review, one of the core activities for the profession? Code review is as fundamental for SWE as double entry is for accounting. Yes, we know that functional code can get generated at incredible speeds. Yes, we know that apps and what not can b…

Either really comprehensive tests (that you read) or read it. Usually i find you can skim most of it, but like in core sections like billing or something you gotta really review it. The models still make mistakes.

You can't skim over AI code.

For even mid-level tasks it will make bad assumptions, like sorting orders or timezone conversions.

Basic stuff really.

You've probably got a load of ticking time bomb bugs if you've just been skimming it.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#207

Post by samiv »

keyle wrote: post #79
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…

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…

It's not about the tooling it's about the reasoning. An architect copy pasting existing blueprints is still in charge and has to decide what the copy paste and where. Same as programmer slapping a bunch of code together, plumbing libraries or writing fresh code. They are the ones who drive the logical reasoning and the building process.

The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and the user is borderline nothing more than a spectator, an observer and a rubber stamp on top.

Anyone who is in this position seriously need to think their value added. How do they plan to justify their position and salary to the capital class. If the machine is doing the work for you, why would anyone pay you as much as they do when they can just replace you with someone cheaper, ideally with no-one for maximum profit.

Everyone is now in a competition not only against each other but also against the machine. And any specialized. Expert knowledge moat that you've built over decades of hard work is about to evaporate.

This is the real pressing issue.

And the only way you can justify your value added, your position, your salary is to be able to undermine the AI, find flaws in it's output and reasoning. After all if/when it becomes flawless you have no purpose to the capital class!

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#208

Post by svilen_dobrev »

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…

let me ask a stupid/still-ignorant question - about repeatability.

If one asks this generator/assistant same request/thing, within same initial contexts, 10 times, would it generate same result ? in different sessions and all that.

because.. if not, then it's for once-off things only..

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#209

Post by Robin_Message »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #208
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…

let me ask a stupid/still-ignorant question - about repeatability. If one asks this generator/assistant same request/thing, within same initial contexts, 10 times, would it generate same result ? in different sessions and all that. because.. if not, then it's for once-off things only..

If I asked you for the same thing 10 times, wiping your memory each time, would you generate the same result?

And why does it matter anyway? I'd the code passes the tests and you like the look of it, it's good. It doesn't need to be existentially complicated.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#210

Post by [deleted] »

Robin_Message wrote: post #209
svilen_dobrev wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let me ask a stupid/still-ignorant question - about repeatability. If one asks this generator/assistant same request/thing, within same initial contexts, 10 times, would it generate same result ? in different sessions and all that. because.. if not, then it's for once-off things only..

If I asked you for the same thing 10 times, wiping your memory each time, would you generate the same result? And why does it matter anyway? I'd the code passes the tests and you like the look of it, it's good. It doesn't need to be existentially complicated.

[deleted]
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