AI

I do think AI/LLMs have value, but not as much as the “AI enthusiast crowd” thinks. I like specific concrete examples of what AI can do. I think that treating AI as a pair programmer is one case where it provides value. I don’t have much experience with human pair programming, but I have seen that having multiple people design and review code as it is written can be fantastically productive — and sometimes not. If you are a single developer, you can use AI as your pair programmer by asking it to explain and review code, suggest alternatives, and look for ways to simplify. In this setup, you are still the developer: the AI may write code, but you still need to understand it. Used this way, AI challenges your ideas, helps you learn, and leads to better code. ...

I write these summaries to structure my own thinking about AI/LLM-assisted development — and to have something to look back on (and probably cringe at) in the future. What has happened in the last 3–6 months AI/LLM prices are increasing Local and mobile models are surprisingly capable CLI-based AI tools continue to work extremely well AI/LLMs remain excellent for search, explanation, and learning A wave of buzzwords: skills, multi-agent, CLI, MCP, plan mode AI tools still make mistakes, especially in uncharted territory AI/LLM prices are going up GitHub Copilot is changing its pricing structure this month. Anthropic and others are restricting the use of fixed-price subscription keys with third‑party tools like OpenClaw. The trend is clear: pricing will increasingly reflect actual resource usage — and it will be higher. ...

I watched DHH’s demo of the Once deployment tool and where he vibe coded a demo app, and I figured I should try to do the same. Three hours and roughly twenty prompts later, I had a publicly available web app up and running. It is written in ASP.NET, has database access, schema migrations, zero-downtime updates, social login and a semi-generic system for reporting. It works – and I didn’t write or modify a single line of code myself. The AI/LLM coding capabilities impressed me. I could have built the same thing without AI, but it would have taken far longer. ...

I use GitHub Copilot (Pro) and Google Gemini CLI1. Do coding assistants help me develop faster, improve code, or cause other effects? Disclaimer: The way we use AI assisted development will continue to evolve and these are my thoughts and experiences with coding assistants as of November 2025. I expect to look back on this post and feel embarrassed - but that’s part of the journey. I use AI coding assistants in different ways, each with its own impact. ...