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.
Definitely sounds like a tiny shell script but yeah, I guess it’s seconds with an agent rather than a few minutes with manual coding 👍
Yeah pretty much! TBH for the first one there are already things online that can do that, I just wanted to test how the AI would do so I gave it a simple thing, it worked well and so I kept using it. The second one I wasn’t sure about because it’s a bit copyright-y, but yeah like you say it was just quicker. I wouldn’t use the AI for anything super important, but I figured it’d do for a quick little script that only needs to do one specific thing just for me.
I would need to inspect every line of that shit before using it. I’d be too scared that it would delete my entire library, like that dude who got their entire drive erased by Google Antigravity…
Yeah that’s fair. And mine were pretty small scripts so easy enough to check, and I keep proper backups and whatnot so no big deal. But like I say I wouldn’t use it for anything big or important.
It never seconds. The first three versions will don’t do what you want (or not work at all), so you will end up arguing with this shit for significant amount of time without realising it
😅