Hello, Computer?

I have never experienced change at the pace artificial intelligence is changing coding, not in my first 16 years of life amidst the explosion of home computing and programming, not in my 15 years as an engineer, and not for the roughly 20 years I've been coding again.

During 2025, ai coding assistants went from something that could sometimes autocomplete a line of code, to something that could occasionally generate a function or class method from a descriptive comment, to something akin to Star Trek, where you simply tell the computer what to do - and it does it.

And this final phase-shift (pun intended), occurred over roughly the same 2 weeks for everyone who was keeping up - Christmas 2025.

We had all seen the scattered posts on X, read the blog and Medium articles, and experienced the changes in our editors, but for most it was not until the holidays that we tried the most radical shift, from code editor as a primary input method, to Claude Code CLI (Command Line Interface).

Seemingly all at once, there was a great disturbance in the force (to mix metaphors and sci fi franchises), everyone had tried it over the holidays, and came back different.

Now a few months later, workflows are becoming more and more agentic, less and less direct observation, and a thorough understanding of systems architecture has never been more important.

Whether it's Anthropic's Claude, Openai's ChatGPT5.5, or Google's Gemini, coding has changed irrevocably.