Reflecting on Mitchellh's AI Adoption Journey Blog Post
I’ve been re-reading Michellh’s blog post and reflecting on my usage of SKILL and Agentic coding, and have realised its somewhat similar and there are lessons I can learn.
Chatbot Sucks
The interactivity of chatbots is nice when you’re exploring something. However it is rare that you are exploring something when you are trying to deliver with agents. Instead the pattern ends up being:
- Build a prototype
- Review a prototype
- Re-build the prototype
LLMs have gotten so fast, so quickly, that in the interest of speed having prototypes are cheap (think about the Github graveyard of ideas).
Using a chatbot also means a lot of copying and pasting, which is just not fun to use.
Reproducing your work and Engineer the Harness
This is something I can do much better on. I think for far too long, I’ve been sucked into reusing people’s SKILL and relying on other’s SKILL library. But since using Pi harness in anger, my attitude has most definitely changed. Its far easier and quicker to adapt the SKILL and extensions for what you want to use (similar to the prior point). Getting familiar with how the harness may reproduce patterns that you like, makes the whole experience more enjoyable. This is definitely something I should think more about.
I have gotten a lot of mileage from custom AGENT.md and my own personal tastes and it is something I’m continually refining.
Things I’m still learning to take on board
I don’t have agents running 24/7, though I definitely have agents running unattended more often! Its an interesting concept to be comfortable with it crawling and generating reports. Something I ought to spend more time tinking about.
I’m amazed how much focus and throughput Mitchell gets through a one agent setup, which most definitely is aligned with my (lack of) usage surrounding sub-agents. I believe it comes with carefully and thoughtfully controlling the how agents behave and interact with each other.
In a comforting way, reading the article is reassuring – that skill acquisition and growth is still possible so long as we care about our tools, craft and processes.