I’m feeling enthusiastic about what I’m doing. Again. First time in many, many years. I feel like I’m back in 2007, when the iPhone was announced and I was preparing to develop for the new device. I felt the same way when I was first introduced to IntelliJ IDEA and its editing power. Yes, it is about coding agents.

I’m an old developer. Not that old, but I’ve been coding professionally for more than 25 years. Like, every day (almost), for at least some time, I’m writing code. I’m opinionated. I’m experienced. I’m stubborn. I’m often dumb. I’m learning constantly. I’m very lazy. All those things are true. But I’m also passionate about what I do. I love programming, and I wouldn’t stop even if all computers stopped working. I started coding on a piece of paper (I had no computer back then), and I will continue to do it if there’s no other way.

And coding changed a lot since the 90s. New IDEs appeared: from GWBasic, Borland Pascal, and Spectrum Basic to the pinnacle of IDEs, IntelliJ IDEA. New languages matured and disappeared, and I’ve tried lots: Pascal, Java, Ruby, C#, C++, Scala, Objective-C, Swift, Kotlin, JavaScript, and many more. Frameworks and paradigms change all the time. I love that. And of course, I want to create things. It is incredible when an abstract idea turns into something palpable (even usable sometimes). I think that this is the best thing in programming: when you have an ephemeral thought, then you work hard, and magic happens, an app appears. Or a framework, a library, whatever.

I’m lazy, but I’m passionate. I started with the smallest apps ever, like a Sokoban game. But I constantly moved to bigger and bigger projects. Now I’m building quite big stuff, like Domika, or iTrace apps. That is great. But I want to go bigger, and I want to do that myself. Sure, I can delegate, but why should I delegate what I love?

That is not easy to do. First, it is hard to create something beyond some size of “big”. Physically hard. Second, when you’re building huge stuff, you are drowning in it. And because of that, you have no time to make something “for fun”, some small and useful projects. One can say that I’m not scaling well enough. Yup, something like that.

Looks like it’s in the past. History is split into “before 2026” and now. I feel like I was unable to move quickly enough before. Like my hands were tied. Now I’m free. I have grown extra hands even. I can quickly prototype, create things. I can simultaneously work on several parts of a project, or several projects at once. I even have time to create useful utility stuff, which I gave up on doing long ago (because I was “busy doing other, real stuff” ‾\_(ツ)_/‾). And for some strange reason, it does not feel like I’m delegating. I’m doing it myself.

All this stuff is so easy now. For example, these are things that I did last week (besides my daily job):

created a helper app for my colleague that uses our system infrastructure and presents some data in a human-readable way, allowing him to debug and test hypotheses about it.
created several scripts that help me to release new versions of apps and check that my code is more consistent and accurate
restored an old (like, really old, 15-year-old) project. It was not working. It used APIs that are long gone. It had more than a thousand problems, according to Xcode. And I managed to update it to a fully working state in several hours, convert it to another API, and clean up all warnings (and I do mean it, every single one of them). I could’ve modernized it from Objective-C to Swift too, but at this point I don’t care, Objective-C is perfectly fine for it to work.
and now I have enough free time to write this text. In English (not my native language), it is kinda hard for me to do, I’m not used to writing texts in English, especially something this long.

Before coding agents existed, all this would be unrealistic. Not impossible, as each task is totally doable, but it would’ve taken days. Now it takes hours. And when LLMs become faster, each task will take a fraction of that. Imagine the power that this unleashes. Mind-blowing.

Last year I was worried a lot that AI would transform programming into something hideous, something I would be repelled by. But this is the opposite of that. I feel better than ever. Programming is definitely transforming, changing into something bigger and better. And it is good. It is great. Finally, tools caught up with my mind.

I’m free. Again.