The last few months have completely changed how I think about building software. I started with small experiments in Visual Studio Code using agent mode. At first it felt like a fun way to automate boring tasks, but once I got better at prompting and started writing better playbooks, the output quality jumped fast.

That led me to Cursor. Compared to what I had in VS Code, the AI integration felt smoother and more natural, and my productivity went up. Not by a little, but enough to feel it every day. Then I got hit by the downside: a rogue background agent ignored spending limits and burned over $300 in one night. After that I kept looking.

Next I tried Claude Code. I was skeptical at first because a CLI workflow sounded like a step backward, but the productivity gains were real. Moving from Cursor to Claude felt like a big jump, not a small upgrade.

At work, we had an old ETL pipeline everyone hated: overengineered, hard to maintain, and full of friction. I rewrote it from scratch one evening and had around 12,000 lines of clean Python with close to full test coverage in about three hours. The same weekend I picked up a startup idea from a friend and built a working SaaS prototype in about ten hours with around 15,000 lines of React and TypeScript. The speed was one thing, but the quality was what surprised me most.

I went from AI skeptic, to cautious user, to fully convinced. We are in a different era now. In many cases it is faster and cheaper to rebuild than to keep patching legacy code forever. That changes how we should write software: less code written to impress other developers, more code written so both humans and AI can understand and extend it safely.

For me the biggest shift is simple: clarity matters more than cleverness. The game already changed, and this is still just the beginning.