How I Code in 2026

Lately it feels like the way we code changes every single month. From the release of ChatGPT to the birth of AI tools like OpenClaw (previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot), nothing has changed more than how much AI is part of my workflow. Before I get into how I'm coding these days, I wanted to share a brief history of how AI has crept its way into my daily workflow.

My first chat to ChatGPT was on March 22nd, 2023. That was 1,066 days ago, and since then, I've had 1,568 conversations with it. That doesn't include chats I've had with similar AI tools like Gemini and Grok, but ChatGPT was the one I used the most. I was using it a lot at work to help me write little helper functions and help me solve errors. This was the status quo for about a year. I was still writing a lot of code and getting help from AI when I needed it.

In August of 2023, I attended React Rally in Salt Lake City, Utah with a coworker. He had started using Cursor and showed me a bit of what it could do between the talks and sessions. I don't think I fully grasped how much of a game changer it was going to be then.

In February of 2024, tab-completion tools were super popular. I had seen a coworker using Copilot one day when I saw him start writing some code, press "TAB" 8 or 9 times in a row, and then have the code he wanted to write materialize out of thin pixels. After seeing that, and after remembering what my other coworker had shown me with Cursor, I decided to hop on the train and sign up for Supermaven. It was an incredibly fast autocomplete tool that helped me build projects like MonkeySpout and DevBrosHQ, but unfortunately, it was sunset in late 2025.

In March of 2025, I ended my Supermaven subscription and signed up for Windsurf. It was an AI code editor much like Cursor, but it was like $5 cheaper a month and I'm a sucker for a good deal. By this point, AI had made its way into basically any place you would need to interact with as a developer. Do you like the terminal more than a code editor? Claude Code has your back. Do you want to have ChatGPT live in your IDE? You've got options. Don't want to use your brain? Sure! Just vibe code some slop and ship it on a Friday. There was no shortage of AI tools to choose from.

It's now February of 2026. In the past year, we've had vibe coding, MCP servers, AI agents, skills, rules, plugins, and the list goes on. AI models are getting better and better. People can build fully functional applications without writing any code (often spending hundreds of dollars in tokens, but still).

I've switched from Windsurf to Cursor because it seems that Cursor is really embracing the AI tools and leading the pack when it comes to AI IDEs. The experience has been great and I'm glad I switched. At this point in time, I'm spending $20 a month for Cursor. I'm also using Codex from OpenAI for free. There is some overlap between the two, but the key difference is that Codex isn't an IDE, rather a command center to run AI agents in parallel and have long running tasks. Cursor also has this capability, and I often find myself just using whichever tool is active on my screen at the time.

In the past, I've used Gemini CLI from Google. It's also a great free tool for those who want to use the command line to interact with AI. I haven't used it since downloading Codex though 😬.

So then, how am I coding in 2026? Well, when I get started on a task, I ask myself a few questions like, "Does the code this task touches contain complex business logic?" and "How quickly could I write the code myself?" to help me decide if I should have an AI agent do the task for me or not. Sometimes, the task could be a learning opportunity or could help me solidify some understanding about some coding concepts. In those cases, I'll prompt an AI agent to help me complete the task and teach me while we work on it together.

After deciding if/how I'm going to use AI for the task, I'll either use Codex or Cursor to prompt an agent. If the task is large enough, I'll throw the agent into plan mode or use a skill I downloaded from skills.sh. Then I review the changes it made, make any necessary adjustments, and give it the 'ol stamp of approval if it all looks good. After all, this code will have my name on it.

Coding has changed a lot in the past few years. It's exciting to see how AI has changed the industry, and also a little scary. I enjoy the time that AI agents free up for me so that I can work on other projects or learn new things or take a break from coding, but I've also realized lately that the more code I have AI write, the less familiar I am with the code in the project, and that scares me a little bit. I'm not sure how to balance the two, but I'm going to keep experimenting and see what works for me.

Thanks for making it to the end. Here's some pie 🥧.