I was a big AI hater — now AI writes most of my code
Summary
A prominent developer who publicly opposed AI now writes most code with AI tools after 6 months of adoption. The shift wasn't ideological—tools simply became pragmatic enough to justify the change, challenging the all-or-nothing debate around AI in software development.
Key Takeaways
- AI code generation adoption accelerated dramatically within a 6-month window, suggesting the technology crossed a usability threshold where pragmatic developers stopped resisting and started integrating.
- Being 'pragmatic about' AI adoption matters more than ideological purity—the speaker previously used AI tools but dismissed them because quality was insufficient, not because of principle.
- Public perception lag exists around developer AI adoption—skeptics still call pragmatic adopters 'shills' despite shifted circumstances, suggesting communication gap between builders and critics.
- Tool quality threshold is the deciding factor for developer AI adoption, not availability—resistance drops when tools actually improve productivity, not when they first arrive.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
What tools do you [music] use? And how much code do you actually ban your right these days, if any? >> Over the last 6 months, we've been cranking a lot of features out, a lot of code out. Most of it has been written by AI at this point. And before that really wasn't the case. I was actually a really big AI hater for a long time. And people still sometimes think I am. And sometimes if I'm pro AI, they're like, "NeetCode, you changed. What happened? Now you're an AI shill." But it's not. I just try to be pragmatic about it because before I was still using the tools. They just weren't as good.…