The Future of Coding: A Personal Journey

When I started coding as a kid, I was captivated by the idea that I could build anything I imagined. The concept of "selling" software seemed almost laughable—why buy when you could create? Of course, reality soon set in as I learned about the complexities of developing high-quality, production-ready software and the challenges of deployment. My initial naiveté gave way to a more nuanced understanding.

Fast forward to today, and we're witnessing a renaissance in software development:

1. ChatGPT-4 amazed us with its capabilities.
2. Claude 3.5 (with artifacts) emerged as a game-changer, arguably still leading the pack.
3. I recently switch from using pure VSCode (?? Microsoft) to Cursor, which revolutionized my daily coding workflow for Python and React, and is proving to be one of my best $20/month investments.

Before Cursor, I explored various AI-assisted coding tools:

• aider (command-line based) - BTW, aider is still awesome, I just don't use it daily like I used to.
• Plandex
• GPT-Pilot
• gpt-engineer
• smol (quirky but interesting)
• devchat (one of the pioneers as far as I am aware)

I regularly/daily use AI mods on the command line, which feels like having superpowered manpages for everything.

Recent discoveries like replit agent and wasp demonstrate that innovation in this space is accelerating. (wicked cool that you can legit dev from your phone). The power of tools like Claude 3.5's artifacts continues to amaze me daily.

All of these advancements point to an exciting future: we're approaching a moment in time [1, 2] when off-the-shelf apps may become obsolete. Instead, if we're able to describe our needs, bespoke solutions can be created on demand, replicator-style.

Reflecting on this journey, I realize my childhood intuition wasn't too far off—it just took half a century to get here. The future of coding looks remarkably similar to its beginnings: a world of limitless possibilities where imagination is the only constraint and one's ability to clearly describe the outcome becomes the operative skill.