Earlier quoted context omitted.
Define investment in this case. He's the cofounder of HashiCorp. I guess you could refer to his equity as an investment here, but I don't really think it tracks the same in this context. He may have a vested interest, but he did cofound HashiCorp as an engineer that actually developed the products, so I find his insight at least somewhat valuable.
Well did he become a billionaire from hashicorp alone or did he invest e.g. millions in stocks (like perhaps ai stocks) to become a billionaire
My AI Adoption Journey
411–420 of 420 posts
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found mostly for context reasons its better to just have a grand overview of the systems and how they work together and feed that to the agent as context, it will use the additional files it touches to expand its understanding if you prompt well.
Does this essentially give the companies controlling these models access to our source code? That is, it goes into training future versions of the model?
Depends on the privacy practices of the people hosting the models, or are providing access to them. Most have an 'opt-out' of helping to train models.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#413This 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…
> When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ...
I use Godbolt regularly, as do many C and C++ devs, for the sake of optimization, but I'm not sure that's what you mean. Checking the generated output is sometimes still needed for correctness, probably more so in the past than now due to threads not being a part of the language and the memory model being under-specified (allowing compiler authors to assume a single-threaded execution model), but those were deficiencies in those languages in particular (since remedied). Paradoxically, it's also still sometimes needed to ensure the compiler doesn't optimize certain code away, for the sake of security.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ai agents work like a mid level engineer They do not. > And clearly super human in some areas. Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology". Lay off the hype pills.
>Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology". Uh, yes they are? That's why they were revolutionary technologies! It's hard to see why a bike that isn't superhuman would even make sense? Being superhuman in at least some aspect really seems like the bare minimum for a technology to be worth adopting.
By "superhuman" the LLM cultists mean "the singularity", "brain in a chip", "eternal life via digitization" and the rest of the claptrap.
Don't let them off the hook.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not great that it's the most expensive (by far), but it's also by far the most expressive programming language.
How is it more expressive? What is more expressive than Turing completeness?
This is a non-sequitur. Almost all programming languages are Turing complete, but I think we'd all agree they vary in expressivity (e.g. x64 assembly vs. TypeScript).
By expressivity I mean that you can say what you mean, and the more expressive the language is, the easier that is to do.
It turns out saying what you mean is quite easy in plain English! The hard part is that English allows a lot of ambiguity. So the tradeoffs of how you express things are very different.
I also want to note how remarkable it is that humans have built a machine that can effectively understand natural language.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA That hasn’t been tech for a long time. Frontend has been changing forever. React and friends have new releases all the time. Node has new package managers and even Deno and Bun. AWS keeps changing things.
There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though, and don't bottleneck your capacity to get things done. To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since 16.8.0 (introduction of hooks) and that was 7 years ago. Yes there are new hooks, but they typically build on older concepts. AWS hasn't deprecated any of our existing services at work (besides maybe a MySQL versio…
> There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though
Well sure. Like there's McDonalds and let's just not care about health or better tastes. The world keeps improving or you're left behind.
> While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.
I haven't touched nom in a long time. No it can't get things done. I dread running it and would cancel it before I can wait for it to complete. Luckily we did get yarn, pnpm and then Bun and life is improving.
> To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since
They have e.g. RSC i.e. React Server Components? See... point proven. You need to keep up. Things like Vercel force it on you.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a little like using Bitcoin to replace currencies [...] At least, Bitcoin transactions are deterministic. Not many would want to use a AI currency (mostly works; always shows "Oh, you are 100% right" after losing one's money).
Bitcoin transactions rely on mining to notarize, which is by design (due to the nature of the proof-of-work system) incredibly non -deterministic. So when you submit a transaction, there is no hard and fast point in the future when it is "set in stone". Only a geometrically decreasing likelihood over time that a transaction might get overturned, improving by another geometric notch with every confirmed mined block th…
Not sure I agree, the only axis on which Bitcoin is non-deterministic is that of time - the time to confirmation is not set in stone. Outcomes are still predictable though and follow strict rules.
It’s a fundamentally different product, LLMs are fuzzy word matchers and produce different outcomes even for the same input every time, they inject variance to make them seem more human. I think we’re straying off topic here though.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#418I’ve gone through a similar journey, not in big tech, but in practical business work. We started with quick experiments: generative prompts in internal tooling, a couple of proof-of-concept bots, and integration of recommendations in mobile apps.
What shifted for us was when we stopped experimenting for novelty and started embedding AI where routine work slowed people down. For example, we built an intake assistant for hospitals: guided questions that organize structured history before a doctor sees the patient. At first it felt promising, but adoption only happened when clinic staff saw that it saved them time and didn’t replace their judgment. That forced us to rethink how we framed the feature. It became about support, not replacement.
The real adoption turning point came when non-technical team members began using the tools without hesitation. That’s when it stopped being AI and just became part of workflow.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#419I 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.
I want that immunity. Gen-AI evangelism is the new virtue signalling.
Re: My AI Adoption Journey
#420Very much like my experience with Claude. First, gave it some simple tasks (Getting this error on my site, etc) The results were surprisingly good. Then I started giving Claude broader tasks, and learning how to write the prompts. Now I have come to the point where I haven't written a line of code in several weeks (quite a change for someone who learned to program on a Burroughs b5500 back in the 70's) So I guess I am a convert.