AI writes all my code: one year in

I’ve been coding since the early 1990s. Or even the mid 1980s, if you count typing programs from Computer + Video Games magazine into a ZX Spectrum as coding.

I loved writing code, and I did it for fun as well as my day job for over three decades. Being in the zone, two hours into a coding session, seeing the complete picture of the system in your head. Microdosing dopamine from solving all the little puzzles, then megadosing it when something big starts working. The “oooh look how clever I am” of showing off something you built.

After the shock of seeing ChatGPT in November 2022 (this thing knows how to write code?), I played with AI coding on a regular basis, seeing the first glimmers of actually useful coding skills coming from GPT-4 in Jan 2024. I wrote a rudimentary coding agent back then. I used early versions of Claude Code and Cursor. The AI output was generally… sort of OK. Sometimes garbage, but often good enough to ratchet you forward a bit, and you could fix up the issues yourself.

Coding agents continued to get better gradually over 2024/25, then all of a sudden…

For me the “holy shit” moment was in October 2025 when I sneaked the laptop open for a few hours on a family holiday and used the newly released Claude Sonnet 4.5 to build hardprompts.ai (a long-abandoned fun project). This was the first time that I’d seen AI build a reasonably complex app end-to-end, running unsupervised for tens of minutes, producing decent code and, wow, actually testing it. It still wasn’t perfect, but for the first time it seemed like working with a colleague rather than using a glorified autocomplete.

Playing more with Sonnet over the Christmas break in 2025, I realised that AI was getting so good at writing code that I should prepare for a world where I’m no longer doing that myself. It was so much faster to hand that over to AI. I’d still be telling the AI what to do and checking its work, but I’d no longer be coding.

Seeing many friends and colleagues, as well as programming royalty like Andrej Karpathy, DHH and antirez come to the same conclusion around the same time confirmed that it wasn’t just me.

So by the start of 2026 I was using AI to write all my code, but it could only take pretty small steps and I had to hold its hand. Now in September 2026 it’s grown up so much, striding ahead on its own and nailing huge tasks. It’s quite scarily good.

I know that I’m fortunate to have had three decades of pleasure from writing code the old-fashioned way. But I miss it less than I thought I would. To be honest, although coding could sometimes be great, it was often boring and repetitive, and it took so much time to build anything.

With AI coding I’m able to cover so much more ground. It’s basically the e-bike version of Steve Jobs’ bicycle for the mind. Depending on the task it honestly feels like AI lets you go 5x or 10x or 100x faster… or even infinitely faster, because you can do things that you wouldn’t even have attempted before.

What are the downsides? I miss being in the flow state on a regular basis. I don’t get the same frequency of dopamine hits. I miss the satisfaction of thinking “I made that. Me.”

But I really love how it removes all the toil and drudgery I used to have to deal with, and gets me so much more quickly from idea to working software.