Wrote up about my personal journey from AI skeptic to someone who finds a lot of value in it daily.

@donaldball It's still a death dealing fascism machine, I'm not going to set the world on fire just so I can code faster, and I look with a lot of askance at the men who think this is okay.

@mitchellh this is pretty spot on with my journey. Phase 1 & 2 are always awkward. Flashbacks to learning vim motions and pair programming while "almost" being proficient

Shocker - agentic coding also requires learning it.

@mitchellh i'm currently cloding the concept of some kind of a consul for agents tools/peers discovery and it's goddamn effective and beautiful to see it in action ; but as i'm a not so good engineer. i'm wondering how you would have designed such stuff

@wseries @nickmaher You seem like a kind well-balanced individual. It’s okay to disagree with me and I respect your opinion. I wish you only happiness and health friend.

@mitchellh I thought letting agents roam wild would work eventually and I could shepherd them as I would a junior sending me PRs for review. This, unfortunately, didn't work for me.

I ended up using smaller, "dumber" models that I could theoretically self-host (GLM-4.7, Qwen-3-Coder-Next) and working in a tighter loop with them (I design the interface, they fill it in).

Primeagen's 99 tool was a big big saviour here

@mitchellh my journey is similar and the agents have opened up a world where I build things that make me more efficient - like CLIs, linters and tool plugins (obsidian) but also fun things (media players).

I’ve started a process of tight engineering practices such as TDD, BDD, consistent architecture (hexagonal) and heavy linting (including custom ones). The idea here is that if these practices are consistent then I can out tool potential slop. BDD is tedious but might pay off the most as it forces you to document edge cases and hopefully it catches context that humans take for granted.

Claudes new tasks and teams are going to make things better/faster/stronger.

@kejne @mitchellh I'm curious, do you use pair programming routinely and efficiently?

I've done it occasionally and it's helpful. I'd put it in the same category with sparring i.e. rubberducking with a colleague - it helps when you're stuck and depleted the obvious first options and/or in need of a change.

Usually it's some specific item or ticket and there's an oppotunity to use two heads for it. One on the computer and one as the codriver. After a swift half hour it usually diffuses to "I'll take it from here, thanks"

I've also tried mob programming in a student project which was interesting. However I haven't had the people or the energy to drive further experiments to dig more into these. I wonder if there's still some corners unturned for me.