Until 18 months ago, I wrote every line of code myself. Today, AI writes 80% of my initial implementations while I focus on architecture, review, and steering multiple development threads simultaneously.
This isn't another "AI will change everything" post. This is about the messy reality of integrating AI into production development workflows: what actually works, what wastes your time, and why treating AI like a "junior developer who doesn't learn" became my mental model for success.
The backstory: We run monthly engineering workshops at Sanity where someone presents what they've been experimenting with. Last time was my turn, and I showed how I'd been using Claude Code.
This blog post is from my presentation at our internal workshop (10-min recording below).
My approach to solving code problems has pivoted four times in my career:
For the first 5 years, I was reading books and SDK documentation.
Then 12 years of googling for crowd-sourced answers.
It was 18 months of using Cursor for AI-assisted coding
And recently, 6 weeks of using Claude Code for full AI delegation
Each transition happened faster than the last. The shift to Claude Code? That took just hours of use for me to become productive.
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