Really good piece from Pinecoder: a diary of how working with the models changed, one phase at a time. ChatGPT as a better Google. Pasting Ruby specs in because they didn’t want to write them by hand. Tab completion. Agentic prompting that one day turned out to be the whole job. Then Opus 4.5 and a 3x in merged PRs, then Opus 5.5 and feeling “frozen, at zero” again.
I identify with so much of it. The phases line up with mine, minus the Ruby.
The ending is the part that stuck:
Everything is upside down yet again. I think about the future. But I work in the present. How I work is changing again; we adapt as we must. If I forget about my fear, I instead become very excited.
Many things about the old ways of working, I miss. Many things I do not. The old way of working feels like just yesterday; but also it feels to be drifting off into the distance.
There is a before and an after, and the line between them is only a couple of years wide. It’s a weird time. I’m working out what I actually think about it over in the garden: Being More Ambitious With Software.