[HN Gopher] My AI Adoption Journey
___________________________________________________________________
My AI Adoption Journey
Author : anurag
Score : 201 points
Date : 2026-02-05 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mitchellh.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mitchellh.com)
| therein wrote:
| [flagged]
| stronglikedan wrote:
| most AI adoption journeys are
| alterom wrote:
| >Underwhelming
|
| Which is why I like this article. It's _realistic_ in terms of
| describing the value-propositio of LLM-based coding assist
| tools (aka, _AI agents_ ).
|
| The fact that it's _underwhelming_ compared to the hype we see
| every day is a very, very good sign that it 's _practical_.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker
| News.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| For the AI skeptics reading this, there is an overwhelming
| probability that Mitchell is a better developer than you. If he
| gets value out of these tools you should think about why you
| can't.
| dakiol wrote:
| Don't get it. What's the relation between Mitchell being a
| "better" developer than most of us (and better is always
| relative, but that's another story) and getting value out of
| AI? That's like saying Bezos is a way better businessman than
| you, so you should really hear his tips about becoming a
| billionaire. No sense (because what works for him probably
| doesn't work for you)
|
| Tons of respect for Mitchell. I think you are doing him a
| disservice with these kinds of comments.
| tux1968 wrote:
| Maybe you disagree with it, but it seems like a pretty
| straightforward argument: A lot of us dismiss AI because "it
| can't be trusted to do as good a job as me". The OP is
| arguing that someone, who can do better than most of us,
| disagrees with this line of thinking. And if we have respect
| for his abilities, and recognize them as better than our own,
| we should perhaps re-assess our own rationale in dismissing
| the utility of AI assistance. If he can get value out of it,
| surely we can too if we don't argue ourselves out of giving
| it a fair shake. The flip side of that argument might be that
| you have to be a much better programmer than most of us are,
| to properly extract value out of the AI... maybe it's only
| useful in the hands of a real expert.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >A lot of us dismiss AI because "it can't be trusted to do
| as good a job as me"
|
| Some of us enjoy learning how systems work, and derive
| satisfaction from the feeling of doing something hard, and
| feel that AI removes that satisfaction. If I wanted to have
| something else write the code, I would focus on becoming a
| product manager, or a technical lead. But as is, this is a
| craft, and I very much enjoy the autonomy that comes with
| being able to use this skill and grow it.
| tux1968 wrote:
| Nobody is trying to talk anyone out of their hobby or
| artisanal creativeness. A lot of people enjoy walking,
| even after the invention of the automobile. There's
| nothing wrong with that, there are even times when it's
| the much more efficient choice. But in the context of say
| transporting packages across the country... it's not
| really relevant how much you enjoy one or the other; only
| one of them can get the job done in a reasonable amount
| of time. And we can assume that's the context and spirit
| of the OP's argument.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >But in the context of say transporting packages across
| the country... it's not really relevant how much you
| enjoy one or the other; only one of them can get the job
| done in a reasonable amount of time.
|
| I think one of the more frustrating aspects of this whole
| debate is this idea that software development pre-AI was
| too "slow", despite the fact that no other kind of
| engineering has nearly the same turn around time as
| software engineering does (nor does they have the same
| return on investment!).
|
| I just end up rolling my eyes when people use this
| argument. To me it feels like favoring productivity over
| everything else.
| mold_aid wrote:
| >Nobody is trying to talk anyone out of their hobby or
| artisanal creativeness.
|
| Well, yes, they are, some folks don't think "here's how I
| use AI" and "I'm a craftsman!" are consistent. Seems like
| maybe OP should consider whether "AI is a tool, why can't
| you use it right" isn't begging the question.
|
| Is this going to be the new rhetorical trick, to say "oh
| hey surely we can all agree I have reasonable goals! And
| to the extent they're reasonable you are unreasonable for
| not adopting them"?
| mitchellh wrote:
| There is no dichotomy of craft and AI.
|
| I consider myself a craftsman as well. AI gives me the
| ability to focus on the parts I both enjoy working on and
| that demand the most craftsmanship. A lot of what I use
| AI for and show in the blog isn't coding at all, but a
| way to allow me to spend more time coding.
|
| This reads like you maybe didn't read the blog post, so
| I'll mention there many examples there.
| fizx wrote:
| I enjoy Japanese joinery, but for some reason the housing
| market doesn't.
| z0r wrote:
| I'm not as good as Fabrice Bellard either but I don't let that
| bother me as I go about my day.
| mold_aid wrote:
| "Why can't you be more like your brother Mitchell?"
| jorvi wrote:
| The AI skeptics instead stick to hard data, which so far shows
| a 19% reduction in productivity when using AI.
| simonw wrote:
| https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-
| experienced-o...
|
| > 1) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not
| currently speed up many or most software developers.
| Clarification: We do not claim that our developers or
| repositories represent a majority or plurality of software
| development work.
|
| > 2) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not speed
| up individuals or groups in domains other than software
| development. Clarification: We only study software
| development.
|
| > 3) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems in the near
| future will not speed up developers in our exact setting.
| Clarification: Progress is difficult to predict, and there
| has been substantial AI progress over the past five years
| [3].
|
| > 4) We do NOT provide evidence that there are not ways of
| using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve
| positive speedup in our exact setting. Clarification: Cursor
| does not sample many tokens from LLMs, it may not use optimal
| prompting/scaffolding, and domain/repository-specific
| training/finetuning/few-shot learning could yield positive
| speedup.
| recursive wrote:
| Perhaps that's the reason. Maybe I'm just not a good enough
| developer. But that's still not actionable. It's not like I
| never considered being a better developer.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Good article! I especially liked the approach to replicate manual
| commits with the agent. I did not do that when learning but I
| suspect I'd have been much better off if I had.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Much more pragmatic and less performative than other posts
| hitting frontpage. Good article.
| alterom wrote:
| Finally, a step-by-step guide for even the skeptics to try to
| see what spot the LLM tools have in their workflows, without
| hype or magic like _I vibe-coded an entire OS, and you can
| too!_.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > 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 that's Facebook for
| dogs" and it'll make so many assumptions about the architecture,
| code and product that there's no chance it produces anything
| useful beyond a cool prototype to show mom and dad.
|
| A lot of successful LLM adoption for code is finding this sweet
| spot. Overly specific instructions don't make you feel
| productive, and overly broad instructions you end up redoing too
| much of the work.
| sho_hn wrote:
| This is actually an aspect of using AI tools I really enjoy:
| Forming an educated intuition about what the tool is good at,
| and tastefully framing and scoping the tasks I give it to get
| better results.
|
| It cognitively feels very similar to other classic programming
| activities, like modularization at any level from architecture
| to code units/functions, thoughtfully choosing how to lay out
| and chunk things. It's always been one of the things that make
| programming pleasurable for me, and some of that feeling
| returns when slicing up tasks for agents.
| allenu wrote:
| I agree that framing and scoping tasks is becoming a real
| joy. The great thing about this strategy is there's a point
| at which you can scope something small enough that it's hard
| for the AI to get it wrong and it's easy enough for you as a
| human to comprehend what it's done and verify that it's
| correct.
|
| I'm starting to think of projects now as a tree structure
| where the overall architecture of the system is the main
| trunk and from there you have the sub-modules, and eventually
| you get to implementations of functions and classes. The goal
| of the human in working with the coding agent is to have full
| editorial control of the main trunk and main sub-modules and
| delegate as much of the smaller branches as possible.
|
| Sometimes you're still working out the higher-level
| architecture, too, and you can use the agent to prototype the
| smaller bits and pieces which will inform the decisions you
| make about how the higher-level stuff should operate.
| jedbrooke wrote:
| so many times I catch myself asking a coding agent e.g "please
| print the output" and it will update the file with "print
| (output)".
|
| Maybe there's something about not having to context switch
| between natural language and code just makes it _feel_ easier
| sometimes
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > On the other extreme you can tell an agent "make me an app
| that's Facebook for dogs" and it'll make so many assumptions
| about the architecture, code and product that there's no chance
| it produces anything useful beyond a cool prototype to show mom
| and dad.
|
| Amusingly, this was my experience in giving Lovable a shot. The
| onboarding process was literally just setting me up for failure
| by asking me to describe the detailed app I was attempting to
| build.
|
| Taking it piece by piece in Claude Code has been significantly
| more successful.
| apercu wrote:
| I actually enjoy writing specifications. So much so that I made
| it a large part of my consulting work for a huge part of my
| career. SO it makes sense that working with Gen-AI that way is
| enjoyable for me.
|
| The more detailed I am in breaking down chunks, the easier it
| is for me to verify and the more likely I am going to get
| output that isn't 30% wrong.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Exactly. The LLMs are quite good at "code inpainting", eg "give
| me the outline/constraints/rules and I'll fill-in the blanks"
|
| But not so good at making (robust) new features out of the blue
| kcorbitt wrote:
| And lately, the sweet spot has been moving upwards every 6-8
| weeks with the model release cycle.
| raphinou wrote:
| I recently also reflected on the evolution of my use of ai in
| programming. Same evolution, other path. If anyone is interested:
| https://www.asfaload.com/blog/ai_use/
| fix4fun wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experiences :)
|
| You mentioned "harness engineering". How do you approach building
| "actual programmed tools" (like screenshot scripts) specifically
| for an LLM's consumption rather than a human's? Are there
| specific output formats or constraints you've found most
| effective?
| butler14 wrote:
| I'd be interested to know what agents you're using. You mentioned
| Claude and GPT in passing, but don't actually talk about which
| you're using or for which tasks.
| EastLondonCoder wrote:
| This matches my experience, especially "don't draw the owl" and
| the harness-engineering idea.
|
| The failure mode I kept hitting wasn't just "it makes mistakes",
| it was drift: it can stay locally plausible while slowly walking
| away from the real constraints of the repo. The output still
| sounds confident, so you don't notice until you run into reality
| (tests, runtime behaviour, perf, ops, UX).
|
| What ended up working for me was treating chat as where I shape
| the plan (tradeoffs, invariants, failure modes) and treating the
| agent as something that does narrow, reviewable diffs against
| that plan. The human job stays very boring: run it, verify it,
| and decide what's actually acceptable. That separation is what
| made it click for me.
|
| Once I got that loop stable, it stopped being a toy and started
| being a lever. I've shipped real features this way across a few
| projects (a git like tool for heavy media projects, a
| ticketing/payment flow with real users, a local-first genealogy
| tool, and a small CMS/publishing pipeline). The common thread is
| the same: small diffs, fast verification, and continuously
| tightening the harness so the agent can't drift unnoticed.
| bdangubic wrote:
| This is the most common answer from people that are rocking and
| rolling with AI tools but I cannot help but wonder how is this
| different from how _we should have built software all along._ I
| know I have been (after 10+ years...)
| EastLondonCoder wrote:
| I think you are right, the secret is that there is no secret.
| The projects I have been involved with thats been most
| successful was using these techniques. I also think
| experience helps because you develop a sense that very
| quickly knows if the model wants to go in a wonky direction
| and how a good spec looks like.
|
| With where the models are right now you still need a human in
| the loop to make sure you end up with code you (and your
| organisation) actually understands. The bottle neck has gone
| from writing code to reading code.
| xyst wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Don 't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but
| please don't be rigidly or generically negative._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| underdeserver wrote:
| > At a bare minimum, the agent must have the ability to: read
| files, execute programs, and make HTTP requests.
|
| That's one very short step removed from Simon Willison's lethal
| trifecta.
| recursive wrote:
| I'm definitely not running that on my machine.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| > babysitting my kind of stupid and yet mysteriously productive
| robot friend
|
| LOL, been there, done that. It is much less frustrating and
| demoralizing than babysitting your kind of stupid colleague
| though. (Thankfully, I don't have any of those anymore. But at
| previous big companies? Oh man, if only their commits were ONLY
| as bad as a bad AI commit.)
| davidw wrote:
| This seems like a pretty reasonable approach that charts a course
| between skepticism and "it's a miracle".
|
| I wonder how much all this costs on a monthly basis?
| tptacek wrote:
| As long as we're on the same page that what he's describing _is
| itself a miracle_.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| There are so many stories about how people use agentic AI but
| they rarely post how much they spend. Before I can even consider
| it, I need to know how it will cost me per month. I'm currently
| using one pro subscription and it's already quite expensive for
| me. What are people doing, burning hundreds of dollars per month?
| Do they also evaluate how much value they get out of it?
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| Low hundreds ($190 for me) but yes.
| latchkey wrote:
| I quickly run out of the JetBrains AI 35 monthly credits for
| $300/yr and spending an additional $5-10/day on top of that,
| mostly for Claude.
|
| I just recently added in Codex, since it comes with my $20/mo
| subscription to GPT and that's lowering my Claude credit usage
| significantly... until I hit those limits at some point.
|
| 20 _12 + 300 + 5_ ~200... so about $1500-$1600/year.
|
| It is 100% worth it for what I'm building right now, but my
| fear is that I'll take a break from coding and then I'm paying
| for something I'm not using with the subscriptions.
|
| I'd prefer to move to a model where I'm paying for compute time
| as I use it, instead of worrying about tokens/credits.
| senko wrote:
| For those wondering how that looks in practice, here's one of
| OP's past blog posts describing a coding session to implement a
| non-trivial feature: https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-
| vibing (covered on HN here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434)
| apercu wrote:
| I 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".
| polyrand wrote:
| > a period of inefficiency
|
| I think this is something people ignore, and is significant. The
| only way to get good at coding with LLMs is actually trying to do
| it. Even if it's inefficient or slower at first. It's just
| another skill to develop [0].
|
| And it's not really about using all the plugins and features
| available. In fact, many plugins and features are counter-
| productive. Just learn how to prompt and steer the LLM better.
|
| [0]: https://ricardoanderegg.com/posts/getting-better-coding-
| llms...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > I'm not [yet?] running multiple agents, and currently don't
| really want to
|
| This is the main reason to use AI agents, though: multitasking.
| If I'm working on some Terraform changes and I fire off an agent
| loop, I know it's going to take a while for it to produce
| something working. In the meantime I'm waiting for it to come
| back and pretend it's finished (really I'll have to fix it), so I
| start another agent on something else. I flip back and forth
| between the finished runs as they notify me. At the end of the
| day I have 5 things finished rather than two.
|
| The "agent" doesn't have to be anything special either. Anything
| you can run in a VM or container (vscode w/copilot chat, any cli
| tool, etc) so you can enable YOLO mode.
| keyle wrote:
| It's amusing how everyone seems to be going through the same
| journey.
|
| I do run multiple models at once now. On different parts of the
| code base.
|
| I focus solely on the less boring tasks for myself and outsource
| all of the slam dunk and then review. Often use another model to
| validate the previous models work while doing so myself.
|
| I do git reset still quite often but I find more ways to not get
| to that point by knowing the tools better and better.
|
| Autocompleting our brains! What a crazy time.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| 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, but I wish
| there had been a smoother path to this future. The early LLMs
| like GPT-3 could _sort of_ code enough for it to look like there
| was a lot of potential, and so there was a lot of hype to drum up
| investment and a lot of promises made that weren 't really viable
| with the tech as it was then. This created a large number of AI
| skeptics (of whom I was one, for a while) and a whole bunch of
| cynicism and suspicion and resistance amongst a large swathe of
| developers. But could it have been different? It seems a lot of
| transformative new tech is fated to evolve this way. Early
| aircraft were extremely unreliable and dangerous and not yet
| worthy of the promises being made about them, but eventually with
| enough evolution and lessons learned we got the Douglas DC-3, and
| then in the end the 747.
|
| If you're a developer who still doesn't believe that AI tools are
| useful, I would recommend you go read Mitchell's post, and give
| Claude Code a trial run like he did. Try and forget about the
| annoying hype and the vibe-coding influencers and the noise and
| just treat it like any new tool you might put through its paces.
| There are many important conversations about AI to be had, it has
| plenty of downsides, but a proper discussion begins with close
| engagement with the tools.
| arcxi wrote:
| but annoying hype is exactly the issue with AI in my eyes. I
| get it's a useful tool in moderation and all, but I also
| experience that management values speed and quantity of
| delivery above all else, and hype-driven as they are I fear
| they will run this industry to the ground and we as users and
| customers will have to deal with the world where software is
| permanently broken as a giant pile of unmaintainable vibe code
| and no experienced junior developers to boot.
| beoberha wrote:
| Your sentiment resonates with me a lot. I wonder what we'll
| consider the inflection point 10 years from now. It seemed like
| the zeitgeist was screaming about scaling limits and running
| out of training data, then we got Claude code, sonnet 4.5, then
| Opus 4.5 and no ones looked back since.
| cal_dent wrote:
| Just wanted to say that was a nice and very grounded write up;
| and as a result very informative. Thank you. More stuff like this
| is a breath of fresh air in a landscape that has veered into
| hyperbole territory both in the for and against ai sides
| zubspace wrote:
| It's so sad that we're the ones who have to tell the agent how to
| improve by extending agent.md or whatever. I constantly have to
| tell it what I don't like or what can be improved or need to
| request clarifications or alternative solutions.
|
| This is what's so annoying about it. It's like a child that does
| the same errors again and again.
|
| But couldn't it adjust itself with the goal of reducing the error
| bit by bit? Wouldn't this lead to the ultimate agent who can read
| your mind? That would be awesome.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| It is not a mind reader. I enjoy giving it feedback because it
| shows I am in charge of the engineering.
|
| I also love using it for research for upcoming features.
| Research + pick a solution + implement. It happens so fast.
| dudewhocodes wrote:
| Refreshing to read a balanced opinion, from a person who has
| significant experience and grounding in the real world.
| taikahessu wrote:
| Do you have any ideas on how to harness AI to only change
| specific parts of a system or workpiece? Like "I consider this
| part 80/100 done and only make 'meaningful' or 'new
| contributions' here" ...?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-05 23:00 UTC)