Back in February of 2026 (remember those days, wow, good times) I wrote a few posts about AI which I thought would age really well. I had seen so many hype cycles like this before, and all the people breathlessly marketing them at me. And I had tried to get AI to build me a podcast app, it was beyond a joke. It tried to store my podcasts in one giant JSON file. It made so many basic and fundamental mistakes that I wrote it off as people breathlessly building 70% of an app and calling it a day. These people hadn't yet realised that they would have to live with the consequences of all the weird and wonderful decisions their LLM made, I told myself.
Now it's the end of 2026. Claude Opus 5.5 is here, and if I'm honest it has blown my mind a little. It no longer makes those kind of mistakes (though it's by no means perfect). With enough care, thought and testing, you probably could genuinely get it to build you an entire podcast app with no programming experience. And more. I'll be honest, I don't know what to make of that. I'm not telling you how to feel about it either. Should you embrace it? Should you fight against it? I honestly don't know. But pretending it isn't here doesn't seem like an option either.
I reassure myself, and the future of my career, by telling myself that there's no substitute for taste. For product knowledge. For saying no, that's not quite right one hundred times until you get what you want. But is that actually true forever, or just for now? Can we train an LLM, or put tooling around it, to get to a place where you can automate quality, taste, the thousand nos for every yes? I think we can't, but I'm far from certain.
And now I am finding I can do things I previously wouldn't have attempted. I'm building a game in my spare time, something I've always wanted to do but just never had the time to dive into. I'm still coding some of it, but if I'm honest I'm also just letting Claude run rampant so I can learn things. It's a fun experience, do some play testing, iterate, do some more play testing, more iteration. I now have an experienced developer who I can bounce things off of and architect things with. Is this costing another developer a job? No, I just never would have built the game in the first place. I'm also sketching things in a notebook and getting it to build the assets for me. I'm less easy about this, and I think the gaming community is as well. Art does feel like it should have soul, and an artist. Is me sketching things and coming up with all the ideas enough to make it art, or have I removed the soul? Again, I have no answers. I did play test it on my two younger nephews though and they seemed genuinely excited about all the little details and playing the game. That was always the dream for me, make something fun, bring people joy, something games have done for me for decades now.
I was so right about the crypto bro's building the world's slowest distributed database being a useless endeavour, and it was. So useless. The AI hype cycle had all the same hallmarks, it even re-used their discarded hardware! But this...this is something else.