February 2026. One sentence from a coworker woke up a development life that had been asleep for three years.

I was clueless about dev communities when a coworker casually dropped this on me:

"Have you tried Claude Code?"

The AI I'd only ever used in a browser was apparently coming inside my own machine. I tried it half-skeptical, and the result floored me. A development life I'd shelved for three years started turning again. Here's that timeline.

Part 1. It started with text files