I’m looking back at some of my posts in 2025 and seeing that there is
probably more AI-related stuff than I would like. It’s moving so much
and having so much impact on the way I personally write code, so I
can’t help myself. I feel like even a year ago, if you asked me how I
would be writing code, it wouldn’t be through a couple of terminals
talking to AI agents. I didn’t have terminal UI Developer Experience
(DX) on my bingo card. I still thought IDEs were important. Now do I
really need more than diff and $PAGER? I didn’t think that the end
result would empower moving back to simple tools and UIs.
I’ve noticed plenty of distrust adopting agents or adapting to vibing. I think there are two things that come to mind to explain it. The first is that these models are generally proprietary, coming from large “evil” corporations, and they launder copyright by learning on everything posted on the open web. I know of projects that don’t just avoid GitHub because it’s closed source, but also because they don’t agree with the idea that their code will be used to feed AI models. I think it’s fine to take that political stance, but I think it ends up being more harmful than helpful if the project wants to grow free software. It sort of reminds me of Guix going out of the way to deblob the kernel and make it harder for people to run it on general hardware. Free software projects that ban AI usage are going to handicap their growth. Test infrastructure, linters, etc. are going to become more important than ever in reducing time and stress of reviewing contributions. On a side note, I’m happy that I can do so much more in my free time.
I think the second reason for hesitation is partially the human reason of being slow to change. If I was only using free-tier models, I’d probably be complaining about dumb slop, but I’ve had some recent experiences with Opus 4.5 that blew me away. I finished one of the largest migrations I’ve ever done at work, which I wouldn’t have even attempted if I wasn’t able to dole out the work to Sonnet 4.5 to migrate code in thousands of files. If the code is fully written by my hand, then I still feel a bit of hesitation having the AI modify it, but I can imagine it’s only a matter of time. I’m worried I’ll never truly learn how to write another programming language because it’ll be easier to tell it what I want.
In 2026, I’d like to see better integration with managing agents in containers in the cloud because my experience with Jules and Claude Code on web has been underwhelming. I don’t know if that will be able to beat a local experience with a sandboxed user account in YOLO mode, but I can almost imagine a future where I’m able to interact with it easily through my cell phone while I focus on other things.