AI Changes Everything

Summary

AI Changes Everything written on Wednesday, June 4, 2025 At the moment I'm working on a new project. Even over the last two months, the way I do this has changed profoundly. Where I used to spend most of my time in Cursor, I now mostly use Claude Code, almost entirely hands-off. Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I've gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work. I alternate between giving it instructions, reading a book, and reviewing the changes. If you would have told me even just six months ago that I'd prefer being an engineering lead to a virtual programmer intern over hitting the keys myself, I would not have believed it. I can go can make a coffee, and progress still happens. I can be at the playground with my youngest while work continues in the background. Even as I'm writing this blog post, Claude is doing some refactorings. While all this is happening, I've found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It's obvious now that we're undergoing a tremendous shift. AI is out of the bottle, and there's no putting it back. Even if we halted all progress today, froze the weights, halted the training, the systems already out there would still reshape how we live, work, learn, and communicate to one another. What however took longer to accept is just how profound that change really is. As an engineer coming from a world of deterministic things, who deeply values the craft of engineering, to accept the messiness of what agents are doing took a while to digest. It took me a while to even warm up to tool usage by AI in the first place — just two years ago I was convinced AI might kill my wife. In those two years however we can incredibly far. We have reached the point where even if we stopped here (and there is no indication we will) AI is already a new substrate for a lot of new innovation, ideas and creations and I'm here for it. It has moved beyond...