If AI has ruined software development, why am I coding in the sun with a pint and having a lovely time?

“OOOooo nooo! AI has ruined software development. The craft is dead. It’s never been worse.”

Meanwhile, I’m a software developer with 10 years’ experience, sat in the garden at 3pm on a Monday during a British heatwave, laptop open, pint in hand, watching Claude Code calmly work through the implementation loop I mapped out this morning..

Five years ago, I’d have been indoors like a POW, vitamin D deficient, pulling my hair out because 1 tiny config value, import, dependency permission, environment variable, Docker layer, YAML indentation yada yada yada.. had decided to ruin my entire day.

Now the workflow is: Design the loop. Build the harness. Point the agent in the right direction. Let it cook. Read the detailed summary. Review the actual work like a responsible adult. Say, “Yeah, this feels good.” Move on to the next thing.

I’m not saying AI writes perfect code..

I’m saying software development now feels less like being trapped in a windowless room staring at endless mildly relevant Stack overflow tabs , and more like being the senior dev reviewing a very fast, very enthusiastic new starter who occasionally needs to be told, “No mate, absolutely not, why have you invented three new abstractions?”

I’m not sat there doing nothing while the agent works. That’s when I’m thinking about direction, trade-offs, architecture, risk, and whether we’re solving the right problem. The older I get, the more I realise good engineering is as much about judgement as it is about typing code.

Some people are mourning the death of coding.

Personally, I think software development has never been better.