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

241–250 of 420 posts

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#241

Post by Applejinx »

dns_snek wrote: post #236
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! Architect's copy-pasting is equivalent to a software developer reusing a tried and tested code library. Generating or writing new code is fundamentally different and not at all comparable. > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shov…

Very likely, yes. One day we'll have a clearer understanding of how minds generalize concepts into well-trodden paths even when they're erroneous, and it'll probably shed a lot of light onto concepts like addiction.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#242

Post by sampullman »

LiamPowell wrote: post #222
rhubarbtree wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is disingenuous and distracts rather than addresses the point. Yes, it is possible for a compiler to have a bug. No, that is I’m mo way analogous to AI producing buggy code. I’ve experienced maybe two compiler bugs in my twenty year career. I have experienced countless AI mistakes - hundreds? Thousands? Already. These are not the same and it has the whiff of sales patter trying to address objections. Pl…

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.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#243

Post by andai »

bonesss wrote: post #227
andai wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously besides the point but I did blindly follow a wiener schnitzel recipe ChatGPT made me and cooked for a whole crew. It turned out great. I think I got lucky though, the next day I absolutely massacred the pancakes.

Recent experiments with LLM recipes (ChatGPT): missed salt in a recipe to make rice, then flubbed whether that type of rice was recommended to be washed in the recipe it was supposedly summarizing (and lied about it, too)… Probabilistic generation will be weighted towards the means in the training data. Do I want my code looking like most code most of the time in a world full of Node.js and PHP? Am I better served by…

There was a guy a few months ago who found that telling the AI to do everything in a single PHP file actually produced significantly better results, i.e. it worked on the first try. Otherwise it defaulted to React, 1GB of node modules, and a site that wouldn't even load.

>Am I better served

For anything serious, I write the code "semi-interactively", i.e. I just prompt and verify small chunks of the program in rapid succession. That way I keep my mental model synced the whole time, I never have any catching up to do, and honestly it just feels good to stay in the driver's seat.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#244

Post by Applejinx »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #181
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…

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 that people will have even in the event that all these nice blinky screens are ruined and go dark.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#245

Post by nosianu »

tptacek wrote: post #97
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, code review continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in our org, with or without agentic AI pumping out 1k LOC per hour.

Ok? You still have to read the code.

That's just not what has been happening in large enterprise projects, internal or external, since long before AI.

Famous example - but by no means do I want to single out that company and product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

From my own experience, I kept this post bookmarked because I too worked on that project in the late 1990s, you cannot review those changes anyway. It is handled as described, you keep tweaking stuff until the tests pass. There is fundamentally no way to understand the code. Maybe its different in some very core parts, but most of it is just far too messy. I tried merely disentangling a few types ones, because there were a lot of duplicate types for the most simple things, such as 32 bit integers, and it is like trying to pick one noodle out of a huge bowl of spaghetti, and everything is glued and knotted together, so you always end up lifting out the entire bowl's contents. No AI necessary, that is just how such projects like after many generations of temporary programmers (because all sane people will leave as soon as they can, e.g. once they switched from an H1B to a Green Card) under ticket-closing pressure.

I don't know why since the beginning of these discussions some commenters seem to work off wrong assumptions that thus far our actual methods lead to great code. Very often they don't, they lead to a huge mess over time that just gets bigger.

And that is not because people are stupid, its because top management has rationally determined that the best balance for overall profits does not require perfect code. If the project gets too messy to do much the customers will already have been hooked and can't change easily, and when they do, some new product will have already replaced the two decades old mature one. Those customers still on the old one will pay premium for future bug fixes, and the rest will jumpt to the new trend. I don't think AI can make what's described above any, or much worse.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#246

Post by epolanski »

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…

> It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers.

Frankly I'm so tired of the usual "I don't find myself more productive", "It writes soup". Especially when some of the best software developers (and engineers) find many utility in those tools, there should be some doubt growing in that crowd.

I have come to the conclusion that software developers, those only focusing on the craft of writing code are the naysayers.

Software engineers immediately recognize the many automation/exploration/etc boosts, recognize the tools limits and work on improving them.

Hell, AI is an insane boost to productivity, even if you don't have it write a single line of code ever.

But people that focus on the craft (the kind of crowd that doesn't even process the concept of throwaway code or budgets or money) will keep laying in their "I don't see the benefits because X" forever, nonsensically confusing any tool use with vibe coding.

I'm also convinced that since this crowd never had any notion of what engineering is (there is very little of it in our industry sadly, technology and code is the focus and rarely the business, budget and problems to solve) and confused it with architectural, technological or best practices they are genuinely insecure about their jobs because once their very valued craft and skills are diminished they pay the price of never having invested in understanding the business, the domain, processes or soft skills.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#247

Post by latexr »

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…

> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though (…)

> We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for (…)

> When was the last time (…)

None of those are the same thing. At all. They are still all deterministic approaches. The architect’s library of things doesn’t change every time they use it or present different things depending on how they hold it. It’s useful because it’s predictable. Same for all your other examples.

If we want to have an honest discussion about the pros and cons of LLM-generated code, proponents need to stop being dishonest in their comparisons. They also need to stop plugging their ears and not ignore the other issues around the technology. It is possible to have something which is useful but whose advantages do not outweigh the disadvantages.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#248

Post by eklavya »

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…

Right, now what would you say is the probability of getting a bug in compiler output vs ai output?

It's a great tool, once it matures.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#249

Post by cadamsdotcom »

latexr wrote: post #247
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 (…) > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for (…) > When was the last time (…) None of those are the same thing. At all. They are still all deterministic approaches. The architect’s library of things doesn’t change every time they use it or present different things depending on how they hold it. It’s useful because it’s predictable. Same for all your other e…

I think the word predictable is doing a bit of heavy lifting there.

Lets say you shovel some dirt, you’ve got a lot of control over where you get it from and where you put it..

Now get in your big digger’s cabin and try to have the same precision. At the level of a shovel-user, you are unpredictable even if you’re skilled. Some of your work might be out a decent fraction of the width of a shovel. That’d never happen if you did it the precise way!

But you have a ton more leverage. And that’s the game-changer.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#250

Post by senko »

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 will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug.

First compilers were created in the fifties. I doubt those were bug-free.

Give LLMs some fifty or so years, then let's see how (un)reliable they are.

Post reply on HN