For a long time, I actively resisted using AI in my development workflow. I had my reasons. Some principled, some probably just habit. But over the last few weeks that changed completely. I now spend the majority of my development time in Claude Code or the Zed agent panel, and I find myself thinking about my work in fundamentally different ways.
In the beginning, every character came from me: reading documentation, thinking through logic, typing it all out. Then came code completion tools, which accelerated the mechanical parts without changing much else. I still authored every meaningful decision; the tools just helped me express them faster.
Agent-driven development is something else entirely. The code itself is largely written by AI. I keep hearing that AI makes anyone a developer. I don't buy it. When AI writes the code, the judgment layer above it matters more, not less. Architecture decisions, naming conventions, understanding when a pattern is appropriate or when it will create technical debt: none of that comes from prompting. It comes from years of reading and writing code, making mistakes, and developing taste. That's something I've felt in the work.
What has changed for me is my role in the work. I'm now often running two or three features in parallel, sometimes across different clients and projects simultaneously. A year ago that would have been impossible. Not enough hours. Now it's possible because my contribution has shifted. I spend less time writing code and more time planning what to build, thinking through architecture, reviewing what the agent(s) produced, and making sure the resulting software will actually be maintainable six months from now. It feels more like directing than writing. Made With Care, a personal project I've been building alongside client work, is where I feel this most clearly. My progress on it is already beyond what I could have achieved working on it full time before.
I'm not sure where this goes from here. The tools keep changing. So does what I spend my time on. But the role of the developer isn't disappearing. It's changing. And for the first time in a while, I find that genuinely exciting.