AI Makes It Easy to Build. That Doesn’t Mean We Should Ship More

Dax is spot on.

sent this to the team today

everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible

and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that pic.twitter.com/HlIpY86eJn

— dax (@thdxr) March 10, 2026

When it comes to using AI, be like Luke

I love using AI coding tools. As someone who definitely gets their money’s worth, I feel more productive than ever.

But sometimes, just like Obi-Wan told Luke, you need to let go.

Control the instinct to reach for AI all the time.

Trust yourself.

No, the sun does not shine out of Claude’s backside

As of today, Opus 4.5 is the best coding model I've used. That is not praise by vibes. That is, after building libraries and utilities that fixed problems I could not solve with the tools I was using before.

The progress is impressive.

However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, as people on social media and YouTube claim.

AI Code Needs Rules, Not Rituals (The Proof)

I wrote previously about why AI-generated code needs rules, not rituals.

AI coding agents aren't going anywhere. They're excellent at exploring ideas, generating boilerplate, and moving fast. But speed without reliability just ships bugs faster. And without constraints, AI-generated code is unreliable by default.

Prompting is a ritual. Linting is a rule.

Here is the proof.

AI Code Needs Rules, Not Rituals

Coding agents are here to stay, and I know I’m absolutely right about that. While we're all getting used to workflows using AI-powered coding agents, we now live in the world of dark arts and rituals.

We spend hours tweaking prompts, creating elaborate Claude.md, Agents.md and other files formatted in a particular way, stored in a particular way essentially performing black magic to hope our LLM agent adheres to our team's best practices and coding patterns.

On a good day, it works. On others, the behaviour is random.

Here's the problem: Random is not good enough for production.

We're trying to force a non-deterministic, generative tool to be a deterministic rule-follower. This is the wrong approach.

Instead, we should let AI do what it does best: be creative and generative, helping us achieve and realise our desired outcomes while following instructions and examples for how, what, and where it should generate.

My advice? Stop relying on hope-driven prompting. Start using linters to guarantee your standards.