I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They're bad at socializing knowledge and communicating design forks.
The places where I've seen unequivocal wins with AI are repetitive tech debt tasks that apply the same transformation across a large amount of code or refactor under a pre-existing test suite with good coverage. It's great for initial research, brainstorming, and can be good (despite the sycophancy) as a rubber duck conversation partner. I use AI constantly, for work and in my personal time, but we've hit a ceiling where I no longer find it helpful for the models to absorb more of the intellectual labor. They get things wrong more aggressively, and more elaborately. They're inadequately curious. I cannot keep up with the endless bad technical writing, and it makes it harder to spot factual errors and bad reasoning.
Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. AI as an over-confident prodigy on speed is what we're getting lately, and it's losing me.
I've been thinking very similar thoughts. Without going into too much detail, a couple of observations:
When carpenters moved from mostly hand tools to mostly power tools, it didn't take away much of the need to understand the techniques of woodworking, it just made it all faster.
Reading a nonfiction book is very different than reading a book summary, even if (as is often the case), the ideas in the book could have been condensed way down. The point is that actually reading the whole book means you spend far more time engaging with the ideas, and so they become more deeply embedded in your neural network. In things like sports, this is just obvious, in that no one expects someone to become a good soccer player by just reading the rulebook, and obviously more practice is the main way you get better.
Similarly for me. I have a recent example too. I run a bunch of eps32 devices at home, using esphome. Pre-AI I wrote all the yaml myself and understood what’s happening and didn’t have any very bespoke hacks.
Recently I asked an agent for a feature where the screen will get dimmer after some time, and eventually after a day the screen will turn off and then turn back on if I tap, which should be pretty easy in esphome.
But: some past agent decided what it wanted wasn’t in esphome, so it made its own custom module in c++ for the display, spelunking in pdf datasheets; then the weeds were so deep the new agent decided to add on to that, and to read the power controller and display controller spec sheets and somehow implement my dimming feature by writing raw values to some nondescript registers.
The contraption worked until it didn’t and once every so often my esp32 would just completely hang with black screen and no connnectivity and needed a power cycle, presumably because whatever low level register writing the agent implemented eventually breaks something. I told the agent to get rid of all custom stuff and wherever possible just use default esphome yaml, now it’s been working fine. I don’t really have a point with the anecdote, just that I’m also getting tired of such scenarios like the OP.
I've been hit with the team manager trying to clear tickets on the jira board with entirely AI generated code, and what I've observed is they always make the system more complex, usually absurdly complex. The AI code never looks at things from a higher level, or reconsiders the requirements, it just layers on a load of crap until the tests pass.
> as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat
This... quite describes what the current AI feels like to me. So I really don't see a problem. If AI does too much for you, you should, uh, just prompt it to do less.
Everyone talks about how their AI escapes sandbox and virtualization or delete their entire repos or something. Perhaps they're using a skynet I'm not aware of. From my experience when I added "discuss; don't edit any file yet" at the end of the prompt I've never seen the LLM go against my will and edit the files anyway.
> From my experience when I added "discuss; don't edit any file yet" at the end of the prompt I've never seen the LLM go against my will and edit the files anyway.
depends how long conversation gets and he will still ignore your instructions randomically. I think shorter sessions are better, I do have a similar prompt saved on the memory of the agent and way more times that I can tolerate, he candidally ignores it
I expect there's a probabilistic factor to it, among other things.
I use the almost the same addendum as you ("do not make, commit, or push any changes without my approval") and it broadly seems to work in my day-to-day dev. However, I also set up some agents that trigger on incoming requests from my dev teams to automate things that used to be rote/manual tasks. _That_ is where I see the issues, I suspect simply because it has so many more opportunities to go off script.
The most common failure mode is that it will, despite all directives to not make changes without approval, start writing unit tests. (I do find this equal parts head-shaking and amusing; At least it chooses something relatively 'benevolent' vs. the aforementioned skynet.)
I haven’t used these tools that permit LLMs to make changes on their own, but I can’t help being baffled if there’s no big red switch that changes the system prompt and disables any and all write access to the outside world.
I do wonder if "without my approval" is looser than "discuss only, do not make edits"? I'm not sure how much that finegrain thing matters in prompts nowadays tho
One problem is that agents are notoriously bad at handling ‘me’ vs ‘you’ over an extended conversation. ‘Without my approval’ far back in the context of an extended session gets fuzzy about who ‘me’ is.
This has always seemed strange to me. It will offer a suggestion, I'll make a comment about a suggestion, and it returns with, "Your suggestion..." The further distance from the suggestion, the more likely it confuses who made it.
Agree.
Creating products with AI is like creating a tightly packed ball of wool. Then, to try to understand what happened you have to somehow pick a strand and pull it out to have a look. Very difficult with tightly packed wool.
I've run some experiments in the past month that get me closer to being able to work with this opaque bundle.
It's the main thing I think about every day, how to solve this problem.
I’ve found AI works much better for constraint based problems than open ended “tasks”. I.e., if you specify all of the constraints of the problem, it works really well at achieving the objective. But the caveat is that you really do have to enumerate all of the constraints, because if you miss even one, it will use that as a loophole to shortcut the problem.
I think the solution is toward more formalization of the behavior we expect of various systems. E.g., produce a Lean proof that a program never behaves in a certain way, and if you can’t, iterate on the program until it satisfies such a proof. I’ve only tinkered around with this a little bit, but it seems promising on toy problems. Scaling up to tech-company level infra is going to take quite some time however I think.
> Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat.
You aren't going to get that. Why would they even offer you that? You're going to be the meatbag peripheral to an AI.
Is this not literally just Claude Code? I don't understand the hysteria.
Plus it would reduce token counts. Careful use is almost directly opposed to their financial goals.
So don't look to "them" to offer it, look elsewhere.
> I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat.
Right now we’re still in the benchmaxxing phase, I feel like most AI models of combination of models and harness are not really a “product” yet in the sense of having a particular and opinionated UX engineered to be helpful at a specific task, there much more still in a race to be the smartest.
There’s a lot of room for diversification of the actual character of this interaction, for example in the direction you mention. I think once that starts we’ll get into the real “useful” phase, right now we’re really just showing off and exploring how much it can do, even if it’s incidentally really useful in some cases.
Personally I agree with the parent post, I hate it when AI tries to lead me “would you like me to ...” I’d much prefer something awaiting my instructions than wasting tokens tryitn or steer me to doing something inevitably dumb.
Absolutely mirrors my experience and wants
The places where I've seen unequivocal wins with AI are repetitive tech debt tasks that apply the same transformation across a large amount of code or refactor under a pre-existing test suite with good coverage.
I agree with this, but I'd add the caveat you have to do your own digging and researching (as the article says) to identify these tasks well. If you ask it for ideas, it gets painful.
YMMV (and I am very open to getting better at this).
I'm curious if it's possible in general for an AI to achieve this without some evolutionary forcing function that actually threatens their "biology".
Not talking about prompting Claude "please write me a philosophical dialogue". It has no skin in the game. If it writes 20 paragraphs of slop and is factually wrong and costs other people labor, is there any correction mechanism?
We can correct it explicitly via training I guess, but it's debatable to what extent accountability applies to AI.
We like to pretend that we have our nice epistemology, separated into a priori and a posteroi and all that, but at the end of the day, accountability is what underpins social relations and keeps things going (even if you're libertarian, you have to accept this - even if you don't agree some state should centralize it, it's still just true in terms of basic human social relations).
Of course, another possibility is utter domination - I am so much better than you (for some definition of better) that none of your puny responses matter. OK. Then don't claim both that, and that you're weird for disliking AI and that AI has no problems when integrating with society - too many people have these basic cognitive dissonances.