My all-in AI experiment cost me my confidence

Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I’m just sharing this because I found it insightful.

The author describes himself as a “fractional CTO”(no clue what that means, don’t ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):

I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    20 hours ago

    Once you automate something, the corresponding skill set and experience atrophy. It’s a problem that predates LLMs by quite a bit. If the only experience gained is with the automated system, the skills are never acquired.

    Well, to be fair, different skills are acquired. You’ve learned how to create automated systems, that’s definitely a skill. In one of my IT jobs there were a lot of people who did things manually, updated computers, installed software one machine at a time. But when someone figures out how to automate that, push the update to all machines in the room simultaneously, that’s valuable and not everyone in that department knew how to do it.

    So yeah, I guess my point is, you can forget how to do things the old way, but that’s not always bad. Like, so you don’t really know how to use a scythe, that’s fine if you have a tractor, and trust me, you aren’t missing much.