Six months with AI

I joined my new job back in October of last year, just a couple of months after Anthropic released Opus 4.1 and a month before the drop of Opus 4.5. For folks in the tech industry, the release of these models alongside OpenAI’s Codex, Google’s Gemini, a swath of open models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, and others, combined with the launch of various open and proprietary agentic coding harnesses, has rapidly changed the face of software development. About a month after starting my new job I made a very conscious choice: AI tooling was already widely available and in use1, and given I myself had long been an AI skeptic, I’d not spent any meaningful time with the technology. Given that gap, I chose to use a hackathon (which was conveniently scheduled just three or four weeks into my tenure) to truly immerse myself in the space. Lenore and I had been going back and forth about the idea of a simple quilt designing app, so I decided to go all-in and vibecode2 a prototype application.…