Seven hours on a plane, zero internet, and a curiosity about local AI coding. That’s how I found myself downloading 13GB of AI models in an airport lounge, preparing for what would become an accidental experiment in offline development. This wasn’t a research project or a formal comparison of existing solutions. I was heading back from vacation with a long flight ahead and wanted to avoid getting bored. The idle question nagging at me: what would it be like to have a coding assistant tota...| Between the Prompts
Developers on my team use Cursor’s Tab feature. Designers use vibe-coded prototypes to gather feedback from stakeholders. I rely on Claude Code to plan and build larger features. Same AI technology, completely different approaches. The conversation around AI coding tools assumes a binary: you either use AI or you don’t. But that misses how practitioners actually work. In my journey with AI coding tools, I observed three fundamentally different approaches emerging in AI-assisted development.| Between the Prompts
For the first time in my career, I have absolutely no idea what the software engineer job will look like in five or ten years. I’ve always loved coding. All of it. I love making apps from scratch as much as understanding big, complex codebases. I take pleasure in taking a complex problem and finding a simple implementation, or taking a complex piece of code and making it simpler. This love for the craft shaped my initial resistance to AI coding tools.| Between the Prompts
Field notes from a software engineer documenting how AI tools are reshaping our craft. I fell into AI-assisted coding tools very recently (early 2025), because I was very skeptical about the hype. Now I’m so excited about them that I can’t resist sharing my journey! This blog is for practitioners who care about code quality, junior developers navigating AI-assisted workflows, and anyone curious about what programming looks like when the tools think alongside you.| Between the Prompts
When I first started using Claude Code, I had a naive approach to working with it. I would describe the task directly in the prompt, press Enter, and cross my fingers. If the agent made mistakes, I would tell it how to fix them. For small tasks, this can be good enough, but as the task grows in complexity, this approach reveals several significant drawbacks. When Simple Doesn’t Scale The first problem is that the conversation becomes the only source of truth about the task.| Between the Prompts