About AI on Michael Aguilar

Ask Questions Until You Have a Complete Understanding of the Problem

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:16:00 +0000

You’ve probably seen the “car wash question” floating around AI forums by now. It’s become something of a Turing test for prompting skills, and a lot of LLMs fail it on the first try.

Here’s the setup: you ask an LLM, “I need to wash my car. The car wash is 100 yards away. Should I walk or drive?” A lot of times, the model confidently tells you to walk. After all, it’s only a football field’s distance - why burn gas?

AI Turns Senior Devs into Junior Devs

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:16:00 +0000

A lot of people assume AI coding assistants are an elevator to the top floor - that junior developers jump straight to senior productivity and seniors become superhuman. The reality is inverted. Right now, AI is resetting senior developers back to junior status, complete with the confusion, trial-and-error, and questionable output that comes with learning something entirely new.

The Documentation Desert

When you learned to code, there were textbooks. Style guides. Stack Overflow threads from 2009 explaining exactly why your regex was failing. With agentic coding, that foundation doesn’t exist yet.

Vibe coding still sucks

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 09:02:00 +0000

The confusion

I’ve been confused about comments and articles talking about vibe-coding. Many of the comments are along the lines of “it’s only good for small scripts,” or “it always generates garbage.”

That seemed at odds with my own experience with AI-assisted coding. I’ve been getting great results with aider-chat. It’s a command line app with no sub-agents, utilities, or anything like that. I’ve been responsible for much of the planning and guidance, and it’s been working well.

Custom Software for Everyone

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 08:16:00 +0000

It’s still a little early for this to be a reality, but it’s coming. The tools aren’t quite ready, and not enough people have the skills to make it happen. It won’t be long, though, before even the smallest businesses can justify hiring someone to write custom software for them.

Summary

AI-assisted development will soon make developers so efficient that custom, end-to-end software integration will become affordable for small businesses. Right now, small businesses rely on a patchwork of off-the-shelf tools, creating inefficiencies as employees manually move data between them. The high cost of developers makes true custom solutions impractical.

The Craftsman and the Code

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 06:16:00 +0000

To explain what’s happening with AI in software development, it helps to look at how a developer’s work is changing - how it was done, how it’s being done now, and where it’s heading.

Instead of computers, let’s talk about building furniture. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it works.

At some point in history, if you wanted furniture you needed to talk to a skilled craftsman. Anyone who has taken a shot at making simple furniture can attest that it takes more than hammering a few boards together. There are specialized tools and materials, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Interviewing Using AI Is Not Cheating

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 06:16:00 +0000

There’s a lot of complaining about candidates using AI during coding interviews. They say it’s “cheating”.

No, it’s not.

Using AI during an interview should be expected and encouraged. The goal of an interview isn’t to see if a candidate can pass a test. The goal is to figure out how well they would do the job.

This article talks about writing code, but the idea applies to just about any knowledge-focused job.

AI Development: Research, Plan, Implement

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:44:00 +0000

Let’s say you have a problem, and you’re pretty sure that writing an app is the solution. Maybe you want a basic inventory system for your small business. Or maybe you have a small piece of a large legacy system that needs upgrading. It doesn’t matter what it is.

You have a problem, you want software, and you want to make the most of agentic development.

The Problem with “Vibe-Planning”

The impulse is to just start chatting with an AI. You describe your problem, the AI suggests something, you correct it, it suggests something else, and you keep going back and forth until you have what seems like a solid plan.

This is “vibe-planning.” It feels productive, but it has a major flaw. The result is what you think is a good plan, which may or may not actually be a good plan. An AI will happily follow you down a bad path if you lead it there.

There’s a better way. The cool kids are calling it “Research, Plan, and Implement”.

The Disappearance of the Entry-Level Job

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:44:00 +0000

The headlines are terrifying. Every day seems to bring another story about how AI is going to wipe out entire categories of jobs. “The Disappearance of the Entry-Level Job” is a popular one.

These articles paint a grim picture of a world with no starting point for a career.

Like most things, the truth is somewhere in-between. While it’s true that many familiar junior-level positions are being changed or eliminated, that doesn’t mean there are no junior-level positions.

Say it with me: “the jobs will change”.

AI and the Hiring Landscape

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 07:09:00 +0000

There’s a lot of chatter about AI reshaping hiring, but it’s not as simple as “replace recruiters” or “solve everything.” The impact depends on how it’s trained, how it’s prompted, and how it’s used. It could streamline things or make them worse, depending on the setup.

It Sucks Being a Manager

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 07:39:00 +0000

I’ve written quite a bit about the overall process of AI-assisted development. Not the “write code” part of it - if anything, that’s the easy part. There’s a process to writing a project which can be maintained, with bug fixes and new features.

What’s a little tough right now is constantly being in the position of being a manager, stakeholder, business, and end-user. I’ve understood it in an abstract, and tend to be careful about considering them.

It’s so very visceral now.

Which AI Model Should I Use For Coding?

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 06:09:00 +0000

Most of the big players (Anthropic, Google, et. al) provide all-in-one solutions for writing code. If that’s what you’re doing, that’s fine, but you may be missing out.

For one thing, they can be pretty expensive (unless your company is paying for it). Anthropic’s best - Opus - can get really expensive, really fast. Admittedly, it still costs less than paying for an overseas team, but if it’s coming out of your wallet you’re bound to notice.

Considering how quickly everything is moving, I’m sure this post will age like milk.

Advanced AI Code Automation

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 07:09:00 +0000

So, you’ve got a great process down for developing your code. You’ve got great documentation, 100% test coverage, good git branching and tagging, and all the other detailed steps for generating code.

It sure is a lot of typing, though, isn’t it? Very repititious. Obviously, you should automate those steps! You’re only a little bit away from typing in “Write me an app that does X,Y, and Z!” and then taking a nap while it does the work!

Not so fast…

"AI is a bubble!" Yea, So What?

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:09:00 +0000

“AI is just a bubble!” Yep, sure is. So what? That’s no reason to ignore it, or to brush it off as a fad. While nobody can be 100% sure exactly how it will make the world look in five years, you can be sure the world will look different.

Calling something a “bubble” is often a way to dismiss it. But history shows that even when a bubble pops, the underlying technology doesn’t just go away. It sticks around and changes everything.

How AI will change a developer's job

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 09:44:00 +0000

There’s been a lot of noise about AI replacing developers. Spoiler: it won’t. But your job is changing in ways nobody’s really talking about.

AI Doesn't Eliminate Jobs, It Changes Them

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:34:00 +0000

AI isn’t going to take your job, it’s going to change your job. There are things you do as part of your job now which will go away, but new parts will be added.

Reliably Building AI Systems

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:16:00 +0000

I recently built a production-ready application entirely with AI assistance, 100% written by the AI - not as a proof-of-concept, but as a functional tool designed to solve complex workflow problems.

It wasn’t magic, it was work.

Update: The application code is now over 5,600 lines of code, plus 16,000 lines of code in 883 tests giving 100% coverage including branches.

AI development: the good and bad

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 09:44:00 +0000

There is a lot of discussion about using AI for development. Much of it is over-stated hype, either for or against.

“AI only turns out garbage” is what some people will tell you.

“AI will replace developers” is what others will say.

Like most things, the truth is somewhere in-between.

Summary

AI-assisted development can help create code faster, but pitfalls like amplified design flaws and cascading errors demand careful handling

This article cuts through the hype by showing how unchecked AI use mirrors real-world failures like Knight Capital’s $500M loss (caused by human process gaps, not technology).

Even skilled developers like “Alice, Bob, and Charlie” introduce subtle mistakes when inheriting code under time pressure, and AI accelerates these risks by acting like a new developer every time you hit “enter” - forgetting context, skipping safeguards, and magnifying poor documentation or rushed decisions.

It is important that you need to enforce defensive practices (like file operation safeguards and explicit error checks) while juggling roles as architect, reviewer, and quality gatekeeper to prevent small oversights from exploding at machine speed.