2025-2026 is Weird

I work as a software engineer, so I feel it a lot. We’re living in interesting times. In mid-2025, I started using AI coding tools like Windsurf, Cursor, and Claude Code. Up until then, I had been a bit of an AI coding skeptic. I barely used autocomplete, because, “Every line of code is wrong.” I think I was correct. At that point in the development of AI coding tools, autocorrect was worse than me, and there was little point in having AI write a draft, just to have me correct every line.

Something changed in mid-2025. The tools reached a point at which they didn’t write errors into every line. Compared to Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro was not good at coding, but it was much better than everything that had come before. It unlocked daily use for regular tasks, requiring less supervision and making more progress than previous models. Throughout 2025, the models continued to improve, and in early 2026, they are quite reliable.

Either something changed recently or I changed recently, because all of a sudden, I’m working on a personal project, OpenQuizzer, and Claude Code, with the helper, Codex, make the implementation cost low and the productivity very high. If you look at my personal GitHub, my “contributions” go from almost nothing almost all year to a lot in the past month.

I would be surprised if the rest of 2026 goes back to feeling normal. Instead, by the end of this year, I expect new possibilities to be unlocked that make now look quaint. But maybe we can only feel weird for so long. Maybe we will get used to the pace of change.