Four years of coding with AI

In 2022, every line of code I shipped passed through my own hands. Four years later, most of it is written by agents on machines I rarely touch, and this is how that happened, one change at a time. Manual coding In 2022 the whole setup fit on one laptop: an editor, a repository and a browser tab open to the documentation. Every line of code went through my hands.The routine was old and familiar. I read the docs, wrote the code, ran it and searched for whatever error came back. The browser was already part of the work, though nobody would have called it a collaborator.ChatGPT arrives ChatGPT showed up late that year, in the same tab bar as everything else. It took the occasional question, and its answers came in a different register.At first I used it as a better search box, for explaining an error, describing an API or writing a regex. Whatever it said still had to be read, weighed and retyped by hand.The clipboard loop Soon code was traveling between the chat and the editor. I pasted…