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.
To understand why this feels significant, it helps to trace how the act of writing software has changed over my career. 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. And this is where I want to push back on a narrative I keep hearing: that this means anyone can now build software. I don't buy it. What changes when AI writes the code is not what matters — it's the judgment layer above it. 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. AI accelerates execution; it doesn't replace understanding.
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. That would have been unmanageable before — too much context to hold, too much typing to keep up with. 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. In a way, it feels less like authoring and more like directing. A good example of this is Made With Care, a new personal project I've been building in the mornings and evenings alongside my regular client work. 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 tooling is evolving quickly, and so is the work. 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.