I didn’t write any code this year
It’s February. I haven’t written a single line of code myself this year. Yet I’m shipping more than ever. Claude Opus 4.5 (and recently 4.6) is doing all the hard work and I’m jokingly calling it my friend now. But that’s hardly a joke. I’ve embraced the use of AI and I like it.
I’m not entirely sure I still stand by my post from September 2025, where I compared “using AI in programming” to “cycling with a battery”. At that time, I concluded: “Use AI to learn. Keep pedaling yourself.”
Since Opus 4.5, something drastically changed. The days of half-working output are largely gone. I can’t do it better myself. The output is so spot-on that I can’t justify not fully leveraging it. Among many other things, it helps my team and me solve our most difficult bugs with confidence in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks.
Using AI just to learn and not letting it write your code... It would now feel like bringing your bicycle to a motor race.
On top of that that I’ve found a renewed joy in programming, in discovering how LLMs are changing the landscape and in learning new skills. It’s an exciting time to be a programmer.