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.
It looks like a rigid design philosophy that must completely rebuild for any change. If the speed of production becomes fast enough, and the cost low enough, iterating the entire program for every change would become feasible and cost effective.
I frequently feel that urge to rebuild from ground (specifications) up, to remove the “old bad code” from the context window and get back to the “pure” specification as the source of truth. That only works up to a certain level of complexity. When it works it can be a very fast way to “fix” a batch of issues, but when the problem/solution is big enough the new implementation will have new issues that may take longer to identify as compared with just grinding through the existing issues. Devil whose face you know kind of choice.
… as long as the giant corpos paying through the nose for the data centers continue to vastly underprice their products in order to make us all dependent on them.
Just wait till everyone’s using it and the prices will skyrocket.