The first time I saw something like this in action was in a video about agentic blabla features in VS Code on the official VS Code YouTube channel. Pretty much write a complete and detailed specification, fire away and hope for the best. The workflow kinda clicked for me then but I still find a hard time adjusting to this potential new reality where slowly it won't make sense to generally write code "by hand" and only intervene to make pinpoint changes after reviewing a lot of code.

I've been reading a book about the history of math and at some points in the beginning the author pointed out how some fields undergo a radical change within due to some discovery (e.g. quantum theory in physics) and the practitioners in that field inevitably go through this transformation where the generations before and after can't really relate to each other anymore. I'm paraphrasing quite a bit though so I'll just recommend people check out the book if they're interested: The History of Mathematics by Jacqueline Stedall

And the aforementioned VS Code video, if I remember correctly: https://youtu.be/dutyOc_cAEU?si=ulK3MaYN7_CPO76k

I haven't written code by hand since December when Claude Opus 4.5 came out. It was clear that the inflection point arrived where it's at least as good as I am at implementing a plan. But not only that: it had good ideas like making impossible states impossible with a smart union type without being told and without me deeply modeling the domain in my head to derive a system invariant I could encode like that.

It was depressing watching all of this unfold over the last few years, but now I'm taking on more projects and delivering more features/value than ever before. That was the reason I got into software anyways, to make good software that people like to use.

> the generations before and after can't really relate to each other anymore

Yeah, good point. In some ways it's already crazy to me that we used to write code by hand. Especially all the chore work, like migrating/refactoring, that's trivial for even a dumb LLM to do. It kinda feels like a liability now when I'm writing code, kinda like how it feels when the syntax highlighting or type-checker breaks in the editor and isn't giving you live feedback, so you're surprised when it compiles and runs on the first try.

I remember having a hard time imagining what it was like for my dad to stub out his software program on paper until his scheduled appointment with the university punch card machine. And then sure being happy that I could just click a Run button in my editor to run my program.