I’ve struggled to publish a 2026 essay that captures my headspace appropriately. It’s not because of the blog chill, this time. It’s because of AI/LLM tools.
And not necessarily every AI/LLM tool. Claude Code, in particular. It’s the combination of well-designed developer UX and powerful AI/LLM model behind it. It enables expert command-line tool use, agentic loops, large context windows, customizable prompt-based skills.
I started using Claude Code in March 2025 with the 3.7 Sonnet model, when it was released as a research preview. But as many programmers have observed, the latest models in 2026, such as Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.6 — combined with the latest versions of Claude Code with an ever-improving UX/DX — make “agentic coding” not just an interesting research prototype, but a day-to-day reality for millions of programmers.
This has broken through the usual programmer buzz circles of Hacker News, Lobste.rs, Reddit. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article in January 2026 entitled, “Anthropic’s Claude Code Has the AI World Buzzing.” As the WSJ put it:
Developers and hobbyists are comparing the viral moment for Anthropic’s Claude Code to the [original] launch of generative AI. […] Software engineers, executives and investors [have turned] their work over to Anthropic’s [Claude Code, and, through it, they] witness a thinking machine of shocking capability, even in an age awash in powerful artificial-intelligence tools.
To get a sense of the fever pitch level of buzz in the developer/startup community, consider this: there were over 1,000 mentions of Claude Code in the six week period between January 1, 2026 and February 15, 2026 on Hacker News. And these are not just mere passing mentions. They are threads with thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments. By way of comparison, there were just 100 mentions in the six-week period of May 1, 2025 thru June 15, 2025, a few months after its launch (about 9 months ago).
In January, I wrote a draft of a blog post entitled, “Programming in 2026: equal parts excitement and dread.” I shared this draft with a few programming colleagues and it led to probably the most pre-publication commentary I’ve ever received on an essay in this blog’s entire history. Which is something, in its own right. Another small anecdotal data point that shows me that my colleagues are entering a very different era.
Here is a quote from that unpublished draft:
I mentioned that programmers are living in the future. How so at this very moment? The biggest split could probably be described thusly:
- general non-programmer internet users are adopting ChatGPT (and its ilk) en masse to use their web/mobile interfaces as an alternative to Google, and as a weird new helper in certain life inconveniences — for example, students are using it for homework in lieu of copying off a friend; adults are using it to auto-write polite business emails in lieu of hiring a virtual assistant; the anxious are using it to appease internal brooding in lieu of a remote therapist
- programmers, by contrast, are using tools like Claude Code to ship entire software codebases, most of whose code they didn’t themselves write, since the Claude Code agent wrote the code in “agentic loops” using nothing more than the programmer’s natural language prompt (and, perhaps also, a small/skeletal existing codebase) as a starting point
The contrast between these two kinds of use cases could not be greater, even though the underlying technology is mostly the same.
This has led me to a strange headspace where I charge ahead with work on my startup, PX, while working with wonderful colleagues, fellow senior programmers/engineers. And we use Claude Code, alongside other AI/LLM tools, in our day-to-day work.
But we charge ahead with quite a lot of “AI weirdness” hanging over us. It’s basically all we talk about when we are not talking about our code.
Why? Because the hype cycle has reached such a noisy level that none of us can mute or avoid it. Developer practices are changing. The feeling is “adapt or die.”
And Claude Code isn’t even the only tool out there, it is just the best current illustration of just how rapidly (and dramatically) day-to-day programming is changing.
“This Time Is Different.” But no, really. This time is different.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s an amazing time to be a programmer. Our minds are blown.
But the implications. The implications. The implications.
It’s enough to make one’s head spin off its axis.
And so, all I can say, for now, is that 2026 is going to be a very, very, very weird year for tech overall.
Update: Shortly after I published this post, I noticed Simon Willison (@simonw) — one of the co-creators of Django, creator of Datasette, and prolific Hacker-News-upvoted blogger on AI/LLM coding tools — published a post related to this topic, entitled “Deep Blue.” The post title is a neologism for the “sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.” It’s a nice short name for a real phenomenon. His post is worth a read.
For a more optimistic and cheery perspective, you can pair it with a post published by Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh), creator of Terraform and Ghostty, who describes a credible productivity gain while retaining his unmistakable sense of engineering craft: “My AI Adoption Story”.
I enjoyed this concluding paragraph from Mitchell that is a nice antidote to that “Deep Blue” feeling you might have: “Through this journey, I’ve personally reached a point where I’m having success with modern AI tooling and I believe I’m approaching it with the proper measured view that is grounded in reality. I really don’t care one way or the other if AI is here to stay. I’m a software craftsman that just wants to build stuff for the love of the game.”