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.

  • ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    This has not been my experience at all. I have a top rated VR app and use AI to code everything and change things all the time. It is not hard to understand the code and then prompt the AI to change this or that and then test to see if it got it right. If it did not, just prompt again to address. Maybe this does not work for the author or others, but it has saved my hundreds of hours in my small app.