Over the last eight months, my software development workflow has changed more than I have ever experienced before.
And I say that as someone who has been writing software for about 25 years. I have worked through plenty of programming languages, frameworks, architectural fashions, build tools, frontend revolutions, mobile platform quirks, and enough JavaScript ecosystem churn to qualify for emotional compensation.
For a some time, AI coding tools were helpful, but only in a limited way. They were great for small tasks. Rename this. Refactor that. Write a helper function. Explain this cryptic error message that looks like it was generated by an angry toaster.
But building larger features with AI? Painful. GPT-4 at that time did not convince me that my job would be taken over by a robot. Not at all.
Working with GPT-5.1 still often felt like working with a brilliant intern who had read the entire internet but kept misplacing their notebook every 10 minutes. Once important information fell out of the context window, the AI would forget what we had agreed on and confidently wander into the bushes. Around late 2025, first with GPT-5.2 (and also Claude Sonnet 4.5) and then much more noticeably with GPT-5.3, AI coding finally became genuinely productive for me.
