5 ms·

A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: A Philosophy on AI in Dev

155 points by Ozzie_osman 9mo ago

dehrmann 9mo ago
This is a very sound take: > Will AI replace my job? > If you consider your job to be “typing code into an editor”, AI will replace it (in some senses, it already has). On the other hand, if you consider your job to be “to use software to build products and/or solve problems”, your job is just going to change and get more interesting.
Animats 9mo ago
The distance between manager-speak and LLM-speak is very small. Who wrote that?
lighthouse1212 9mo ago
[dead]
willtemperley 9mo ago
I'm very happy with the chat interface thanks. * The interface is near identical across bots * I can switch bots whenever I like. No integration points and vendor lock-in. * It's the same risk as any big-tech website. * I really don't need more tooling in my life.
- jama211 9mo ago
  Ok?
- audience_mem 9mo ago
  You don't know what you're missing.
- simianwords 9mo ago
  I think the agents are also becoming fungible at the integration layer. Any coding agent should be easily to whatever IDE or workflow you need. The agents are not full fungible though. Each have their own characteristics.
piker 9mo ago
> “Their (ie the document’s) value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as [she] identifies and deals with trouble spots”. Real quote > "Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with trouble spots in his presentation." I mean seriously?
asyncadventure 9mo ago
[flagged]
- whatevermom5 9mo ago
  Would be nice if we had a dedicated button to flag AI comments.
kranner 9mo ago
> If you ask AI to write a document for you, you might get 80% of the deep quality you’d get if you wrote it yourself for 5% of the effort. But, now you’ve also only done 5% of the thinking. This, but also for code. I just don't trust new code, especially generated code; I need time to sit with it. I can't make the "if it passes all the tests" crowd understand and I don't even want to. There are things you think of to worry about and test for as you spend time with a system. If I'm going to ship it and support it, it will take as long as it will take.
- bravetraveler 9mo ago
  I'll borrow your phrasing lest another coworker decide to play therapist. Previously: "I'm not slinging drugs here, I care for myself and the users."
- torginus 9mo ago
  I personally find that it's easier to iterate on 'something' and find what's wrong with it and fix it, than theorycrafting staring at a blank paper.
  - kranner 9mo ago
    Me too! Sometimes I find it easier to ask an LLM to generate something and then it's easier to discard the whole thing, muttering under my breath "no no no that's not how you do this" and write my own code. It would be nice if editors would annotate generated code clearly.
- slfreference 9mo ago
  I think what LLMs do with words is similar to what artists do with software like cinema4d. We have control points (prompts + context) and we ask LLMs to draw a 3D surface which passes through those points satisfying some given constraints. Subsequent chats are like edit operations. https://youtu.be/-5S2qs32PII https://youtu.be/-5S2qs32PII
  - catdog 9mo ago
simianwords 9mo ago
This is one of the more true and balanced articles. On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook. A lot of software tasks are “migrate X to Y” and this is a perfect job for AI. The workflow is generally straightforward - map the old thing to the new thing and verify that the new thing works the same way. Most of this can be automated using AI. Wanna migrate codebase from C to Rust? I definitely think it should be possible autonomously if the code base is small enough. You do have to ask the AI to intelligently come up with extensive way to verify that they work the same. Maybe UI check, sample input and output check on API and functionality check.
- akiselev 9mo ago
  > On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook. It's scary how good it's become with Opus 4.5. I've been experimenting with giving it access to Ghidra and a debugger [1] for reverse engineering and it's just been plowing through crackmes (from sites like crackmes.one where new ones are released constantly). I haven't bothered trying to have it crack any software but I wouldn't be surprised if it was effective at that too. I'm also working through reverse engineering several file formats by just having it write CLI scripts to export them to JSON then recreate the input file byte by byte with an import command, using either CLI hex editors or custom diff scripts (vibe coded by the agent). I still get routinely frustrated trying to use it for anything complicated but whole classes of software development problems have been reduced to vibe coding that feedback loop and then blowing through Claude Max rate limits. [1] Shameless plug: https://github.com/akiselev/ghidra-cli https://github.com/akiselev/ghidra-cli https://github.com/akiselev/debugger-cli https://github.com/akiselev/debugger-cli
  - rubenflamshep 9mo ago
    I'm in the same loop where I find the more access I give it to systems and feedback mechanisms the more powerful it is. There's a lot of leverage in building those feedback systems. With the obvious caveat about footguns :P Gave one of the repos a star as it's a cool example of what people are building with AI. Most common question on HN seems to be "what are people building". Well, stuff like this.
satisfice 9mo ago
The one thing disagree with is having the AI do its own verification. I explicitly instruct it never to check anything unless I ask it to. This is better because I use my own test as a forcing function to learn and understand what the AI has done. Only after primary testing might I tell it to do checking for itself.
OsamaJaber 9mo ago
The hardest part of (a step behind) is knowing when something is crossed over How do you decide when a tool is mature enough to adopt?
- simianwords 9mo ago
  This requires good intuition and being unemotional. Lots of people who become successful are the ones who can get this prediction correct.
  - OsamaJaber 9mo ago
    Agreed but being unemotional easy to say than to do :D
randusername 9mo ago
No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build! AI is a general-purpose tool, but that doesn't mean best-practices and wisdom are generalizable. Web dev is different than compilers which is different than embedded and all the differences of opinion in the comments never explain who does what. That said, I would take this up a notch: > If you ask AI to write a document for you, you might get 80% of the deep quality you’d get if you wrote it yourself for 5% of the effort. But, now you’ve also only done 5% of the thinking. Writing _is_ the thinking. It's a critical input in developing good taste. I think we all ought to consider a maintenance dose. Write your own code without assistance on whatever interval makes sense to you, otherwise you'll atrophy those muscles. Best-practices are a moving train, not something that you learned once and you're done.
- jama211 9mo ago
  “Writing is the thinking” is a controversial and open to interpretation take, so everyone’s gonna argue about it. You muddied the water with that one.
- fourthrigbt 9mo ago
  The product they build is literally mentioned in the post? It’s one of the more popular personal finance/budgeting apps, and it’s a pretty good one in my opinion as someone who has used a variety of them.
- solidasparagus 9mo ago
  The first sentence of the blog post has a link to the product he is building - https://www.monarch.com/ https://www.monarch.com/
  - twism 9mo ago
    with the AI
- bandrami 9mo ago
  I'm really losing patience with AI fluff pieces mostly because I'm a sysadmin and the guys in dev cannot stop talking about how much they're producing with their agents or MCPs or whatever they're called this week and yet they're simply not getting me software to put into production any faster (it's actually slowed down slightly but that's consistent with previous product lifecycles). Neither are any of our vendors, at least as far as I can tell. Even Agile a quarter of a century ago actually produced software at a somewhat faster rate than the team had before (at the cost of more breakage, but there's a business case to be made for that) but I'm literally just not seeing an uptick here.
578_Observer 9mo ago
Your point about avoiding the "bleeding edge" touches on a fundamental principle of endurance that is often ignored in the current AI gold rush. This philosophy is a calculated defense of a legacy—the invisible ledger of trust built over generations. As a former local banker in Japan who spent decades appraising the intangible assets of businesses that have survived for centuries, I’ve learned that true mastery is found in stability, not novelty. In an era of rapid AI acceleration, the real risk is gambling your institutional reputation on unproven, volatile tools. By 2026, when every “How” is a cheap commodity, the only thing that commands a premium is the “Why”—the core of human judgment. Staying a step behind the hype allows you to keep your hands on the steering wheel while the rest of the market is consumed by the noise. Stability is the ultimate luxury.
andrethegiant 9mo ago
Love Monarch. I would love to see the team apply AI to build missing institutions (Robinhood CC, Accrue) faster.
srinath693 9mo ago
This resonates a lot. I’ve found that staying slightly behind the bleeding edge with AI tools actually leads to more consistent productivity. The early-stage tools often look impressive in demos but add cognitive overhead and unpredictability in real workflows. Waiting until patterns stabilize, better UX, clearer failure modes, and community best practices, tends to give a much better long-term payoff.

155 points by Ozzie_osman 9mo ago

This is a very sound take: > Will AI replace my job? > If you consider your job to be “typing code into an editor”, AI will replace it (in some senses, it already has). On the other hand, if you consider your job to be “to use software to build products and/or solve problems”, your job is just going to change and get more interesting.

Animats 9mo ago

The distance between manager-speak and LLM-speak is very small. Who wrote that?

lighthouse1212 9mo ago

[dead]

willtemperley 9mo ago

I'm very happy with the chat interface thanks. * The interface is near identical across bots * I can switch bots whenever I like. No integration points and vendor lock-in. * It's the same risk as any big-tech website. * I really don't need more tooling in my life.

jama211 9mo ago
Ok?
audience_mem 9mo ago
You don't know what you're missing.
simianwords 9mo ago
I think the agents are also becoming fungible at the integration layer. Any coding agent should be easily to whatever IDE or workflow you need. The agents are not full fungible though. Each have their own characteristics.

piker 9mo ago

> “Their (ie the document’s) value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as [she] identifies and deals with trouble spots”. Real quote > "Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with trouble spots in his presentation." I mean seriously?

asyncadventure 9mo ago

[flagged]

whatevermom5 9mo ago
Would be nice if we had a dedicated button to flag AI comments.

kranner 9mo ago

> If you ask AI to write a document for you, you might get 80% of the deep quality you’d get if you wrote it yourself for 5% of the effort. But, now you’ve also only done 5% of the thinking. This, but also for code. I just don't trust new code, especially generated code; I need time to sit with it. I can't make the "if it passes all the tests" crowd understand and I don't even want to. There are things you think of to worry about and test for as you spend time with a system. If I'm going to ship it and support it, it will take as long as it will take.

bravetraveler 9mo ago
I'll borrow your phrasing lest another coworker decide to play therapist. Previously: "I'm not slinging drugs here, I care for myself and the users."
torginus 9mo ago
I personally find that it's easier to iterate on 'something' and find what's wrong with it and fix it, than theorycrafting staring at a blank paper.
- kranner 9mo ago
  Me too! Sometimes I find it easier to ask an LLM to generate something and then it's easier to discard the whole thing, muttering under my breath "no no no that's not how you do this" and write my own code. It would be nice if editors would annotate generated code clearly.
slfreference 9mo ago
I think what LLMs do with words is similar to what artists do with software like cinema4d. We have control points (prompts + context) and we ask LLMs to draw a 3D surface which passes through those points satisfying some given constraints. Subsequent chats are like edit operations. https://youtu.be/-5S2qs32PII https://youtu.be/-5S2qs32PII
- catdog 9mo ago

simianwords 9mo ago

This is one of the more true and balanced articles. On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook. A lot of software tasks are “migrate X to Y” and this is a perfect job for AI. The workflow is generally straightforward - map the old thing to the new thing and verify that the new thing works the same way. Most of this can be automated using AI. Wanna migrate codebase from C to Rust? I definitely think it should be possible autonomously if the code base is small enough. You do have to ask the AI to intelligently come up with extensive way to verify that they work the same. Maybe UI check, sample input and output check on API and functionality check.

akiselev 9mo ago
> On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook. It's scary how good it's become with Opus 4.5. I've been experimenting with giving it access to Ghidra and a debugger [1] for reverse engineering and it's just been plowing through crackmes (from sites like crackmes.one where new ones are released constantly). I haven't bothered trying to have it crack any software but I wouldn't be surprised if it was effective at that too. I'm also working through reverse engineering several file formats by just having it write CLI scripts to export them to JSON then recreate the input file byte by byte with an import command, using either CLI hex editors or custom diff scripts (vibe coded by the agent). I still get routinely frustrated trying to use it for anything complicated but whole classes of software development problems have been reduced to vibe coding that feedback loop and then blowing through Claude Max rate limits. [1] Shameless plug: https://github.com/akiselev/ghidra-cli https://github.com/akiselev/ghidra-cli https://github.com/akiselev/debugger-cli https://github.com/akiselev/debugger-cli
- rubenflamshep 9mo ago
  I'm in the same loop where I find the more access I give it to systems and feedback mechanisms the more powerful it is. There's a lot of leverage in building those feedback systems. With the obvious caveat about footguns :P Gave one of the repos a star as it's a cool example of what people are building with AI. Most common question on HN seems to be "what are people building". Well, stuff like this.

satisfice 9mo ago

The one thing disagree with is having the AI do its own verification. I explicitly instruct it never to check anything unless I ask it to. This is better because I use my own test as a forcing function to learn and understand what the AI has done. Only after primary testing might I tell it to do checking for itself.

OsamaJaber 9mo ago

The hardest part of (a step behind) is knowing when something is crossed over How do you decide when a tool is mature enough to adopt?

simianwords 9mo ago
This requires good intuition and being unemotional. Lots of people who become successful are the ones who can get this prediction correct.
- OsamaJaber 9mo ago
  Agreed but being unemotional easy to say than to do :D

randusername 9mo ago

No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build! AI is a general-purpose tool, but that doesn't mean best-practices and wisdom are generalizable. Web dev is different than compilers which is different than embedded and all the differences of opinion in the comments never explain who does what. That said, I would take this up a notch: > If you ask AI to write a document for you, you might get 80% of the deep quality you’d get if you wrote it yourself for 5% of the effort. But, now you’ve also only done 5% of the thinking. Writing _is_ the thinking. It's a critical input in developing good taste. I think we all ought to consider a maintenance dose. Write your own code without assistance on whatever interval makes sense to you, otherwise you'll atrophy those muscles. Best-practices are a moving train, not something that you learned once and you're done.

jama211 9mo ago
“Writing is the thinking” is a controversial and open to interpretation take, so everyone’s gonna argue about it. You muddied the water with that one.
fourthrigbt 9mo ago
The product they build is literally mentioned in the post? It’s one of the more popular personal finance/budgeting apps, and it’s a pretty good one in my opinion as someone who has used a variety of them.
solidasparagus 9mo ago
The first sentence of the blog post has a link to the product he is building - https://www.monarch.com/ https://www.monarch.com/
- twism 9mo ago
  with the AI
bandrami 9mo ago
I'm really losing patience with AI fluff pieces mostly because I'm a sysadmin and the guys in dev cannot stop talking about how much they're producing with their agents or MCPs or whatever they're called this week and yet they're simply not getting me software to put into production any faster (it's actually slowed down slightly but that's consistent with previous product lifecycles). Neither are any of our vendors, at least as far as I can tell. Even Agile a quarter of a century ago actually produced software at a somewhat faster rate than the team had before (at the cost of more breakage, but there's a business case to be made for that) but I'm literally just not seeing an uptick here.

578_Observer 9mo ago

Your point about avoiding the "bleeding edge" touches on a fundamental principle of endurance that is often ignored in the current AI gold rush. This philosophy is a calculated defense of a legacy—the invisible ledger of trust built over generations. As a former local banker in Japan who spent decades appraising the intangible assets of businesses that have survived for centuries, I’ve learned that true mastery is found in stability, not novelty. In an era of rapid AI acceleration, the real risk is gambling your institutional reputation on unproven, volatile tools. By 2026, when every “How” is a cheap commodity, the only thing that commands a premium is the “Why”—the core of human judgment. Staying a step behind the hype allows you to keep your hands on the steering wheel while the rest of the market is consumed by the noise. Stability is the ultimate luxury.

andrethegiant 9mo ago

Love Monarch. I would love to see the team apply AI to build missing institutions (Robinhood CC, Accrue) faster.

srinath693 9mo ago

This resonates a lot. I’ve found that staying slightly behind the bleeding edge with AI tools actually leads to more consistent productivity. The early-stage tools often look impressive in demos but add cognitive overhead and unpredictability in real workflows. Waiting until patterns stabilize, better UX, clearer failure modes, and community best practices, tends to give a much better long-term payoff.