I wrote my first line of code over 15 years ago (I got into it quite young).

Over the years, I moved from Visual C# to the web, picking up new technologies as they came and went. I got into web development when PHP and jQuery was still popular, and eventually learned React and TypeScript.

But something changed at some point. Building things felt repetitive, and I found myself increasingly disengaged from the process.

I tried building web apps with new technologies like Next.js and serverless functions in an effort to embrace the new way of doing things, but I only ended up increasingly irritated – particularly having to now also deal with the strange implicit limitations and rules around Next.js.

Every line of code felt like a chore and the more I wrote, the more I hated it. I felt like I'd seen it all before, always writing the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways, and was just going through the motions.

But something changed in late 2024, when I got access to the Copilot Workspace technical preview – my first glimpse into agentic coding at the time. It was still early days and was useful on basic tasks, but I immediately realised this was going to be the way we write code in the future, and I loved using it every chance I got.

Then, in 2025, I moved tried out Cursor, Claude Code, Devin, Replit and Codex. It's been insane to witness the rapid evolution of code quality possible with these tools, and it's since completely how I write code.

Today, coding feels fun again. I can go and try out a bunch of new things that would've taken me forever to setup and tinker around with.

I can let AI agents write the features I've written a thousand times before by just writing a good spec, and I can focus on the things that are truly unique and interesting to me, like playing around with the right design for something or refactoring a piece of code to my liking. I can even collaborate with agents on these more advanced tasks too, which is extremely fun.

It also makes it possible to work on things that would've been very hard to maintain in the past, like writing native apps in Swift or Kotlin, or building new custom CLI tools for my own use.

It's a little strange – AI doing more of the typing somehow made me feel more like a builder again, not less.

For the first time in years, I feel like that kid who stayed up way too late just to see if he could make something work.