---
title: "I Stopped Writing Most of My Code"
url: https://raskell.io/talks/iat-13-basel/
author: Raffael Schneider
date: 2026-06-10
description: "Slide deck for IT's ABOUT TECH #13 in Basel. A 15-minute story about what changed for a long-time engineer after Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code arrived, and what happens to a backlog of years-old ideas when the bottleneck stops being time."
tags: [ai-engineering, augmentation, switzerland]
event: "IT's ABOUT TECH #13"
venue: "FHNW Aula, Basel"
---

# I Stopped Writing Most of My Code

IT's ABOUT TECH #13 · Basel · 10 June 2026

## I Stopped Writing Most of My Code

The year my backlog came alive.

Raffael Schneider
Enterprise Solution Architect
AI Platforms

[raskell.io](https://raskell.io)

### It came down to three subscriptions.

December 2022 → November 2025

- December 2022
OpenAI. Subscription almost day one. Chat-first AI joins my daily workflow and stays there.

- Then Zed
A Rust-built editor that bet on AI very early. The best LLM integrations of its era. My gateway to AI-assisted development while Cursor, Windsurf, and Copilot were finding their feet.

- May 2025
Claude Code drops. First TUI-first coding agent. I take the $20 Anthropic subscription the day it ships. Hooked.

- November 2025
Opus 4.5 ships. I upgrade to the $200 Max 20× plan right before Christmas vacation. Three weeks of free time meets a step-change in capability.

I am an engineer. I know how to build things.

The bottleneck was never ideas. The bottleneck was always time.

### Then something changed.

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Code

I expected a better autocomplete.

What I got was something closer to a junior engineer that never sleeps.

### The new workflow

Before

- Decide what to build

- Translate thoughts into syntax

- Review and ship

After

- Decide what to build

- Translate thoughts into syntax

- Decide whether the result is acceptable

You no longer spend most of your time translating thoughts into syntax.
You spend most of your time deciding.

### What I actually built

[### Archipelag.io

Distributed AI compute. Inference across idle GPUs and mining rigs.](https://archipelag.io)
[### Cyanea

Open community platform for life-science research.](https://cyanea.bio)
[### Humankind

A long-running creative initiative, finally with a home of its own.](https://humankind.plus)
[### Arcanist.sh

Haskell ecosystem in Rust. Home of hx and the Basel Haskell Compiler.](https://arcanist.sh)
[### Zentinel

Security-first reverse proxy on Pingora.](https://zentinelproxy.io)
[### Die Zukunft

A Swiss political party. Past left and right, into UBI, digital sovereignty, and a serious technology agenda.](https://die-zukunft.ch)

Experiments and tooling

- Terrarium

- Shiioo

- Conflux

- Refrakt

- Kurumi

- Vela

- …and the daily-driver utilities

None of these were started because AI generated ideas.
AI allowed existing ideas to escape my notebook.

### Where the human still steers.

- Requirements

- Architecture tradeoffs

- Long-term maintainability

- Taste

- Product decisions

- Knowing when not to build something

The human did not disappear. The human moved up the stack.

Before: the human reasoned about syntax; the compiler enforced it. Now: the human reasons about meaning; the coding agent interprets it.

Before

Human
reasons about

- Syntax
enforced by

- Compiler
that makes it work

Now

Human
reasons about

- Meaning
interpreted by

- Coding Agent
that makes it work

### The unexpected consequence

I thought AI would make me write software faster.

Instead, it made me start projects I would never have started before.

The biggest change was not productivity. The biggest change was willingness.

### What happened next

- March 2026 · San Francisco
Co-presented an AI Web Security tool at RSAC 2026 with Milan Duric. Same trip: a private downtown dinner hosted by Maverick Capital, room of AI Platform leaders.

- Spring 2026
Shipped a Temporal-based self-service that lets users order web-service resources while AI quietly handles the operational work. Role at the time: Senior Platform Engineer & Solution Architect, Web Security / Application Delivery.

- Two weeks ago
New role: Enterprise Solution Architect for Group-wide AI Platform and AI-assisted development.

- Last week
Joined [J floor](https://thejfloor.com/). More talks already on the calendar.

None of this was on my calendar a year ago.

Thank you

The most important thing Claude Code gave me was not faster software development.
It gave me the ability to turn years of accumulated ideas into working systems
before I lost interest in them.

[raskell.io](https://raskell.io)
[raffael-e-schneider](https://ch.linkedin.com/in/raffael-e-schneider)
[@raskelll](https://twitter.com/raskelll)