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.
Just ask the ai to make the change?
I don’t know shit about anything, but it seems to me that the AI already thought it gave you the best answer, so going back to the problem for a proper answer is probably not going to work. But I’d try it anyway, because what do you have to lose?
Unless it gets pissed off at being questioned, and destroys the world. I’ve seen more than few movies about that.
You are in a way correct. If you keep sending the context of the “conversation” (in the same chat) it will reinforce its previous implementation.
The way ais remember stuff is that you just give it the entire thread of context together with your new question. It’s all just text in text out.
But once you start a new conversation (meaning you don’t give any previous chat history) it’s essentially a “new” ai which didn’t know anything about your project.
This will have a new random seed and if you ask that to look for mistakes etc it will happily tell you that the last Implementation was all wrong and here’s how to fix it.
It’s like a minecraft world, same seed will get you the same map every time. So with AIs it’s the same thing ish. start a new conversation or ask a different model (gpt, Google, Claude etc) and it will do things in a new way.
Doesn’t work. Any semi complex problem with multiple constraints and your team of AIs keeps running circles. Very frustrating if you know it can be done. But what if you’re a “fractional CTO” and you get actually contradictory constraints? We haven’t gotten yet to AIs who will tell you that what you ask is impossible.
Maybe the solution is to keep sending the code through various AI requests, until it either gets polished up, or gains sentience, and destroys the world. 50-50 chance.
This stuff ALWAYS ends up destroying the world on TV.
Seriously, everybody is complaining about the quality of AI product, but the whole point is for this stuff to keep learning and improving. At this stage, we’re expecting a kindergartener to product the work of a Harvard professor. Obviously, were going to be disappointed.
But give that kindergartener time to learn and get better, and they’ll end up a Harvard professor, too. AI may just need time to grow up.
And frankly, that’s my biggest worry. If it can eventually start producing results that are equal or better than most humans, then the Sociopathic Oligarchs won’t need worker humans around, wasting money that could be in their bank accounts.
And we know what their solution to that problem will be.
AI isn’t good at changing code, or really even understanding it… It’s good at writing it, ideally 50-250 lines at a time
I’m just not following the mindset of “get ai to code your whole program” and then have real people maintain it? Sounds counter productive
I think you need to make your code for an Ai to maintain. Use Static code analysers like SonarQube to ensure that the code is maintainable (cognitive complexity)!and that functions are small and well defined as you write it.
I’ve made full-ass changes on existing codebases with Claude
It’s a skill you can learn, pretty close to how you’d work with actual humans
heh
What full ass changes have you made that can’t be done better with a refactoring tool?
I believe Claude will accept the task. I’ve been fixing edge cases in a vibe colleague’s full-ass change all month. Would have taken less time to just do it right the first time.
It’s a skill this “fractional CTO” lacks