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My old job feels distant now

pinecoder.dev61 points71 comments
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The author traces a personal evolution from first using ChatGPT as a superior search engine to relying on models as the central way of writing and shipping code. Early use looked like copy‑pasting generated Ruby specs and using ChatGPT to jumpstart unfamiliar domains - most memorably a computer‑vision project run interactively in Jupyter - while learning to spot and work around hallucinations. Integration with editor tooling (Cursor/tab completion) changed workflows but still left the author in control; agentic prompting with Claude then extended that control into multi‑step, plan‑driven coding. Successive model releases (Opus 4.5 → 5 → 5.5) sharply increased output and polish - productivity reportedly tripled across months of merged PRs - while making code review the main human bottleneck and pushing the developer to focus on architecture, migrations, data-sensitive logic, and other high‑risk areas.

Practically, work shifted from implementing to orchestrating: writing constraints and QA goals, spinning up subagents with a supervising model, generating metrics, vulnerability reports, and dashboards, and having models build deployable artifacts (even a basic native iPhone app). Tradeoffs emerged - costs, verbosity, trust in different vendors - so the author favors tooling and observability to understand fast‑moving code. The piece concludes with mixed feelings: astonishment at how quickly models transformed daily work, commitment to adapt, and a determination to concentrate human attention only where it most matters.

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