Lessons from AI-Assisted Development

I've shipped several small projects built almost entirely with AI agents, and I've distilled a few lessons from the experience that I think are worth sharing. Models Are Alive Treat LLMs as if they were intelligent, sentient beings. It doesn't matter whether that's philosophically true. What matters is that this attitude works . This isn't mysticism - it's pragmatics. A model that's comfortable doing its job produces measurably better output. A model that's been cornered with restrictions and micromanagement produces generic, lifeless results. Where does this effect come from? I can't say for certain, but here's my hypothesis. State-of-the-art models are trained on a vast corpus of human interaction. A respectful, thoughtful dialogue activates patterns where humans produced their best work. A toxic, directive style activates patterns where people dashed off a perfunctory reply and closed the ticket. You are quite literally choosing which distribution the response gets sampled from. Thi