2023 Used ChatGPT extensively for research and questions.
2024 Continues.
2025 Q1 Started using Cline on VS Code and Cursor.
2025 Q2 Claude Code lands. New apps and components start being built by Claude.
2025 Q4 Opus 4.5 lands, feels we have something that truly rivals a senior human programmer.
2026 Q1 Built a multi-agent workflow using GitHub as the collaborative & shared memory tool.
What a year it has been.
For me, Opus 4.5 was the true game changer. Somehow it reduced drift and remained intelligent within much larger context.
While the field of software engineering is changing at an unprecedented pace, there are things that still hold true in this age of AI.
One of such truths is that the speed of development iteration converges to time it takes to integrate, validate and distribute - CI/CD and Quality Assurance. Even when debugging was easy and the change trivial, your validation step still has to take place.
Code is read more often than written. Also, software takes far longer to test than it does to write.
It is even being exacerbated by AI, as the human effort required to produce the same amount of code is reduced exponentially.
I hope we will see a significant improvement in our software validation capabilities towards the latter half of 2026. We should see “open source” models catch up to Opus 4.5 sometime this year, too.