I've been coding again. Well, vibe coding. I haven't shipped code to any of our company codebases since 2020. At this point for my team, it would be irresponsible for me to stop leading and managing to start designing or coding stuff at work.
But Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex have unlocked something in my brain that I haven't felt for a long time. It's been hard to want to do anything else but sit down at my computer (or chat with Claude on my phone?!) and make stuff! I can squeeze in a couple minutes here or there to write a prompt and make something.
Others Feel It Too
Simon Willison wrote in coding again:
Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents.
AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour.
That's exactly what I've experienced.
Mattias Geniar shared in Web development is fun again:
Claude and Codex gave me the leverage I desperately needed. They've brought me back to levels of productivity I haven't felt in years. I feel like I can manage the entire stack again, with confidence. I can go from idea to execution in days.
Roberto Selbach described it perfectly in Your App Subscription Is Now My Weekend Project:
I have never written a single macOS application. I've never even read Swift code in my life, and yet, I now can get an app up and running in a couple of hours. This is crazy.
What I've Built
In three weeks, I turned my personal site from a static placeholder page into a dashboard of my digital life: recently played music with Last.fm, a stream of YouTube videos I've made, what I'm currently reading, and recent Strava workouts. Any one of those things would have taken my UI designer/developer brain much more work than I care to share.
Last night I built a native Swift app that shows me some live stats from our company in widgets on my home screen. I've wanted something like this for years, but it was never worth asking a dev to build it for us.
The future isn't writing requirements to pass through a product owner, analyst, and developer. I can solve it myself and leave the bigger projects to the professionals.
And don't even get me started about Google's Nano Banana and image creation...
Since I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to "make stuff with computers" and many years later, I'm still getting to learn what that meant!