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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 writing better playbooks, the output quality jumped fast.

That led me to Cursor, where the AI integration felt smoother and productivity went up 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 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.

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 — 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, around 15,000 lines of React and TypeScript. The speed was one thing, but the quality surprised me more.

I went from AI skeptic, to cautious user, to fully convinced. In many cases it's now faster and cheaper to rebuild than to keep patching legacy code forever.