I started writing TypeScript in 2015, back when admitting that out loud in certain circles got you looks. It was barely past 1.0, the tooling was rough outside Visual Studio, and half the people I respected thought I’d lost the plot. I tried it on a side project, saw the editor catch a whole class of dumb mistakes before I’d even saved the file, and that was it. I was in.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about the dangers of leaning on AI too hard. At the time it felt a bit like shouting at a cloud. The tools were handy, sure, but most people I knew still wrote the bulk of their own code and reached for ChatGPT when they got stuck. That world’s gone. Pichai stood up at Cloud Next this year and said 75% of new code at Google is now AI-generated. Two years ago that number was 25%. The engineers there aren’t really writing code anymore so much as approving it. And Google isn’t a special case here. Everyone else is a year or two behind them on the same road.
There’s a fantasy floating around tech circles that AI is about to make software developers obsolete. The logic goes something like this: AI can write code now, therefore anyone can build software, therefore we don’t need programmers anymore. It’s a seductive idea if you’ve never actually shipped production software. I’ve been using AI coding assistants daily for well over a year now. Claude, Copilot, Cursor, the works. And here’s what I’ve learned: AI is genuinely transformative for experienced developers. It’s also genuinely dangerous in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re looking at.
I am a front-end developer. That is my main thing. JavaScript, TypeScript, component frameworks, state management, the DOM and all its quirks. I have spent years in this world and it is where I am most comfortable. If you need someone to build a reactive UI or argue about whether signals are better than virtual DOM diffing, I am your guy. I am also a PHP developer. Have been for a long time. Back-end work, WordPress, Laravel, the lot. That is another core part of my toolkit that has served me well for years.
We’re living through a fascinating time in software development. AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and GitHub Copilot have become powerful tools that can generate code, explain complex algorithms, and even debug issues. I’ve watched developers embrace these tools with varying degrees of success, and there’s a clear pattern emerging: the developers who truly benefit from AI are the ones who already know how to code well. There’s a dangerous narrative floating around that we’re approaching the end of programming as we know it.
I write software for a living, often as a freelancer/consultant. My faith doesn’t make me louder; it makes me clearer. It’s the thing that nudges me toward honesty, courage, and high‑quality work when nobody is watching.
I caught myself doing something embarrassing the other day. I hit a bug, sat there for all of about ten seconds, then alt-tabbed straight to Claude. Not because I was stuck. Because asking was easier than thinking. And the second I noticed it, I felt a bit ill. ChatGPT and Claude are genuinely brilliant. They debug, they rubber-duck, they talk me out of bad ideas at 11pm. I’m not here to tell you to throw them in the bin. I use them every day and I’m not stopping.