GoKawiilIn February of this year, I made a rule for myself: I wasn’t going to write code by hand anymore. I’ve been living by that rule for six months.
The system lived in my head
Back in 2024, before AI, my superpower was knowing how the entire system worked, especially the interfaces between its different components.
If someone came to me with a feature they wanted to build or a bug they were trying to fix, I could usually point them to the exact line of code that mattered and tell them what needed to change. I also remembered why the strange-looking decisions existed and which assumptions were never written down.
This was knowledge I’d built over months and years of working in the codebase. It was hard-earned and invaluable. It let me build features quickly and, more importantly, safely.
The cost was that I had to keep up with everything. As more people contributed, I spent more and more time reading changes just to maintain that mental model.
The bigger cost was the typing. Every time I wanted to build something, I could see the code in my head. I just couldn’t type it out fast enough.
Typing speed was only part of the problem: a feature was almost never one edit. Even a small change spanned multiple layers and touched handlers, schema, tests, and docs. And those edits weren’t equal: a bad handler could be reverted, but a bad migration could leave a mess behind. So writing the code by hand meant carrying one decision safely through every place it touched.
Copilot autocomplete helped immediately: a doc comment became a first draft, often wrong, but beats editing a blank file. Cursor’s tab complete helped more. The models were clearly improving fast.
Claude Code changed a ton. I could describe the change once, and the agent would edit a bunch of files at once.
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