A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Coding workflow

Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write… in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large “code actions” is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks.

IDEs / agent swarms / fallibility

Both the “no need for IDE anymore” hype and the “agent swarm” hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot — they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don’t manage their confusion, they don’t seek clarifications, they don’t surface inconsistencies, they don’t present tradeoffs, they don’t push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic.

Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don’t clean up dead code after themselves. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it’s up to you to be like “umm couldn’t you just do this instead?” and they will be like “of course!” and immediately cut it down to 100 lines.

Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it’s very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. My current flow: a small few CC sessions on the left in terminal windows and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits.

Tenacity

It’s so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago. It’s a “feel the AGI” moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased.

Speedups

It’s not clear how to measure the “speedup” of LLM assistance. Certainly I feel net way faster at what I was going to do, but the main effect is that I do a lot more than I was going to do because 1) I can code up all kinds of things that just wouldn’t have been worth coding before and 2) I can approach code that I couldn’t work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it’s speedup, but it’s possibly a lot more an expansion.

Leverage

LLMs are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals and this is where most of the “feel the AGI” magic is to be found. Don’t tell it what to do, give it success criteria and watch it go. Get it to write tests first and then pass them. Put it in the loop with a browser MCP. Write the naive algorithm that is very likely correct first, then ask it to optimize it while preserving correctness. Change your approach from imperative to declarative to get the agents looping longer and gain leverage.

Fun

I didn’t anticipate that with agents programming feels more fun because a lot of the fill-in-the-blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part. I also feel less blocked/stuck and I experience a lot more courage because there’s almost always a way to work hand in hand with it to make some positive progress. LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.

Atrophy

I’ve already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.

Slopacolypse

I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We’re also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater, on the side of actual, real improvements.

Questions on my mind

TLDR

LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related fields. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it — integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.