Hartley Brody

I no longer write code anymore

Over the last week, I have realized that – despite producing more software than I ever have – I don’t really use a text editor to write code anymore.

I’m not just using coding agents (mostly Claude Opus 4.6, and sometimes OpenAI Codex 5.3) most of the time — it is literally all of the time whenever I need to create or edit code.

Even if I know there’s a tiny change that I need to make. As a recent example, a PR reviewer asked me to change a <div> to a more semantic <button> element. Fair enough!

That’s a small change — trivial even — and I could easily type the characters into an editor myself, but having an agent do it has lots of benefits:

  1. if I make the change manually, I might not do it 100% correctly, maybe missing an aria label or something esoteric
  2. I might not know all of the patterns for how we use <button> elements in other places in the code base, which an agent can easily find and copy
  3. I might not know all of the other places that reference the current <div>, perhaps tests that rely on that specific selector to fire a click
  4. the change is now in the agent’s context, so if tests do break after this change, I can ask the same agent w the same context to fix the tests and it will quickly hone in on the recent button fix
  5. I might not even need to express the change myself, but have the agent go read the PR comment and follow the PR reviewer’s instruction directly

To the extent that I still use cursor, it’s mostly to quickly look things up and read existing code.

Sometimes I’ll use it to read the diffs before letting the agent commit.

I recently added a shortcut that allows me to run git commit -m "" while auto-appending the Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com> commit message convention for joint commit authorship that’s gaining steam.

Sometimes I’ll use cursor to start an inline prompt to ask about something right next to the code in question.

But I don’t really type code into an editor anymore, which seems crazy.

I never would have predicted this 9 months ago, when I had never used a coding agent and was still getting used to cursor. I told a colleague on slack:

i’d say like 30% of the time, cursor feels in the way, but 50% of the time i don’t really worry about it and 20% of the time it knows exactly what to do and saves me having to google stuff

The same day, I also wrote

i do wonder if this will start to give me issues in the next 3-5 years. just seeing how far things have come in the last year already, when i first started taking AI seriously. then thinking about how i’m already able to use AI to reliably generate probably 20-30% of the stuff i need to do, i wonder how soon before it’s >50%

It’s now nearly 100%, with some natural language steering and guidance.

I guess I have fully reached stage 5 of AI driven software development.