I agree that we still haven’t figured out what’s the best way to use AI tools, but over the time it would mature and people would come up with patterns, conventions, and design principles so the quality of what is produced will be maintained or increased while keeping the productivity gains.

After figuring out the exact product we need with some very quick development cycles with AI, we now have some problems that I can't keep under control because of AI. So, currently under consideration to rewrite the core functionality without AI so we can keep it simple, understandable and slower to change.

The interesting part is that AI could do this, but managing developers with AI has become very difficult to get them to slow down and build stable simple things.

Assuming of course everything else stays the same (quality, etc.)

So did Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-worke...

And I'm sure many others who didn't publicize it because they have to keep this circular economy going.

Do you know of any company that banned compilers and went back to hand written assembly?

Do you know of any company that banned stack overflow and went back to figuring everything out?

We're working in a really deep area where having full understanding of our code is more important than speed.

Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer

Having said that, for all our startups “interesting” code I use no AI, not even tab complete. For a few reasons:

- having derived the code and built a mental model is something like 90% of the work, the code artefact being 10%. (You can probably verify this yourself, if you’ve implemented something once and then someone deleted it all, you could rewrite it MUCH faster the second time).

- once I have this model / vision in my mind, I’m streaming it into reality via code and having code suggestions pop up breaks that flow state for me.

- using Claude code even on throwaway scripts can mask problems. Why is doing this thing so difficult that it needs an AI to write the code? And usually when I’m writing those scripts I have a thought or insight about the system. in other words it’s nice to have that low stakes time.

- models are still frustratingly bad at spatial reasoning and I don’t see this improving anytime soon, which is a problem for a lot of graphics code.

- the code models produce still isn’t what I’d consider great code; subjective of course but it’s my product and I think having great code in your core technology is well worth it!

I do still use Claude code on various commoditised pieces (payment flows, basic account UI, etc) and I use Claude as a great search engine, though its explanations of complex topics still kind of sucks and a human blog is almost always better.

We are a small company of 15 engs.

I use AI coding tools both at work and in my hobby projects. It very clear to me they're nuclear-powered footguns, and we have a long, long way yet in developing practices, structures and workflows that will enable true benefits while minimizing the absolutely toxic baggage/fallout/side effects.

I look at the big corp push for AI adoption as another instance of boards of directors choosing the large investors / their own personal gain over the success of the corporations they govern (first instance being the "back to the office" push in attempt to shore up commercial real estate). I think the circular economy of the AI bubble has spread far and wide, and we're watching a lot of invested players trying to keep it going.