We Are Not Going Back

Hey 👋

I was doing the dishes the other day and I had this realization.

We are not going back.

I don’t think we will ever go back to how we used to program. And it happened so fast that I didn’t even notice when it happened.

One day I was writing code. The next day I was… still writing code, but with AI. And then at some point it flipped. Now I’m mostly directing code. Reviewing. Prompting. Iterating. The AI writes most of it.

It wasn’t a dramatic shift. It was subtle. A little bit more capable every week. And suddenly I’m here, doing the dishes, realizing that everything has changed and I don’t know exactly when.

The worst case scenario

Here’s the thing that made me feel okay about all of this:

Even if Anthropic disappears tomorrow. Even if Claude becomes prohibitively expensive. Even if OpenAI implodes. We still have open models.

They’re not quite at the same level yet. But they’re evolving fast. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 6 months we have open-weight models that match what the best closed models can do today.

So this isn’t going away. The genie is out of the bottle.

Why I’m writing this

This is the first post in what I want to be a series about AI. Not hot takes. Not hype. Just… my thoughts. Trying to make sense of what’s happening.

I’m treating these like garden notes — drafts that I publish and then iterate on. They might be short. They might link to each other. They might change as my thinking evolves.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m just trying to think out loud.

More soon.