My team has been chewed out for "just because it didn't work once, you need to keep trying it." That feels, to be blunt, almost religious. Claude didn't bless you because you didn't pray often enough and weren't devout enough.

Maybe we need to not just say "people aren't adopting it" but actually listen to why.

AI is a new tool with a learning curve. But that means it's a luxury choice-- we can spend our days learning the new tool, trying out toy problems, building a workflow, or we can continue to use existing tools to deliver the work we already promised.

It's also a tool with an absolutely abysmal learning model right now. Think of the first time you picked up some heavy-duty commercial software (Visual Studio, Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, whatever). Yes, it's complex. But for those programs, there were reliable resources and clear pathways to learn it. So much of the current AI trend seems to be "just keep rewording the prompt and asking it to think really hard and add more descriptive context, and eventually magic happens." This doesn't provide a clear path to mastery, or even solid feedback so people can correct and improve their process. This isn't programming. It's pleading with a capricious deity. Frustration is understandable.

If I have to use AI, I find I prefer the Cursor experience of "smarter autocomplete" than the Claude experience of prompting and negotiation. It doesn't have the "special teams" problem of having to switch to an entirely different skill set and workflow in the middle of the task, and it avoids dumping 2000 line diffs so you aren't railroaded into accepting something that doesn't really match your vision/style/standards.

What would I want to see in a prompt-based AI product? You'd have much more documented, formal and deterministic behaviour. Less friendly chat and more explicit debugging of what was generated and why. In the end, I guess we'd be reinventing one of those 1990s "Rapid Application Development" environments that largely glues together pre-made components and templates, except now it burns an entire rainforest to build one React SPA. Has anyone thought about putting a chat-box front end around Visual Basic?