I Stopped Writing Most of My Code

01

It came down to two subscriptions.

May → November 2025

1. Before

   Mostly using Zed's AI offering. Solid editor, fine integrations. Nothing that changed how I worked.

2. May 2025

   Claude Code drops. I take the $20 Anthropic subscription on day one. Early adopter, on a hunch.

3. November 2025

   Opus 4.5 ships. I upgrade to the $200 Max 20× plan right before Christmas vacation. A better model meets three weeks of free time on my hands.

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

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

02

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.

03

The new workflow

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

04

What I actually built

Archipelag.io

Distributed AI compute. Inference across idle GPUs and mining rigs.

Cyanea

Open community platform for life-science research.

Humankind

A long-running creative initiative, finally with a home of its own.

Arcanist.sh

Haskell ecosystem in Rust. Home of hx and the Basel Haskell Compiler.

Zentinel

Security-first reverse proxy on Pingora.

Die Zukunft

A Swiss political party. Past left and right, into UBI, digital sovereignty, and a serious technology agenda.

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.

05

What AI is still bad at

• 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.

07

What happened next

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Two weeks ago

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

4. Last week

   Joined J floor. More talks already on the calendar.

None of this was on my calendar a year ago.