hashimoto-2026-ai-adoption-journey · post

My AI Adoption Journey – Mitchell Hashimoto

Created: 2026 · Ingested: 2026-09-11

https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey

My experience adopting any meaningful tool is that I've necessarily gone through three phases: (1) a period of inefficiency (2) a period of adequacy, then finally (3) a period of workflow and life-altering

Referenced by

Claims in this catalog that draw on this source, and whether as support or counterpoint.

supportsA correction made in conversation fixes one exchange and is gone when the session ends; the same correction encoded as a guide rule, a sensor, or a permission fixes every future run — so an agent system improves over time only to the extent that failures are converted into harness structure rather than re-applied as prompts, and the rate of new guide rules per week falling is the sign the conversion is working.
contestsGiving a coding agent a repository context file — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md — does not raise its success rate on benchmark coding tasks and costs about 20% more inference: across 4 agents, 2 benchmarks and 3 conditions, LLM-generated files hurt slightly in 5 of 8 settings while developer-written ones gained 2.4% (p=0.21), and agents obey the files — which is why they spend more — so the files do not carry success-relevant information rather than being ignored.