Is that title click baity enough? Heck maybe even intriguing. Well here is yet another dev's opinion and experience with the latest flavor of AI.

Winter 2024 I was at a small startup and working crazy hours outputting crazy amounts of code. I wrote more code those few months than I had the previous year. And like intense stuff like a ledger that tracked spend on different entity levels and real-time approved or declined transactions based off its related entities. In so many ways I was in my prime. My years of training and experience led up to these beautiful few months of pure productivity and output. I was stressed and overworked, sure. But no more than I had been in that past at previous jobs. Yet this time felt different. I felt more drained and tired than usual even though I was feeling satisfied and excited about my work.

Jan 2005, around the same time we were finally pushing months of my hard work to production I also had a doctor's appointment scheduled. I'm not going to lie, my health has not been the greatest the past few years and I take partial blame with some of my poor health habits. But it was frustrating to feel like I was aging and slowing down so fast when I was only 30. I had met with numerous doctors these past few years of downward trend and they all said the same thing. That I am in perfect health and nothing to be worried about. So why then did I feel like crap? Out of pure desperation and a need to maintain my output so I could maintain my income I had seen a few doctors in the past couple of months. This latest appointment was with a functional doctor. My wife had seen them in the past and they did extensive labs compared to a regular doctor so I figured what the heck, lets give it a go. I was expecting the typical answer: you need to be less stressed, eat better and exercise more. Which he did still give, but he also gave news I was not expecting. Only a few minutes into our conversation with the doctor as he started to review my labs with me I learned I big a couple new big words. "Hashimoto's thyroiditis". If I had ever heard those words before they were never logged in my readily know words catalog. So after an explanation from the doctor about how my body is slowly trying to kill itself by attacking its very own thyroid(my wording here, he was much more technically correct in his terms) I had to come to the realization of just what this meant.

TBH, I really didn't know what it meant. I had to ask my lovely AI assistant ChatGPT to break it down for me and help walk me through it all. I was not expecting this at all. I wanted to figure out what was wrong with me, but half me still wanted them to just naively tell me I am fine so I can keep living in the bliss of ignorance. Part of me wishes it was something more severe like cancer so people would understand how awful it is. Not really, but it was a hard one to try to get people to understand. When I tell people there a lot were relieve that it wasn't something super terrible and glad that it can be manageable with lifestyle changes. Sure, that may be true but that doesn't make it easy. Especially when those lifestyle changes are a drastically different and restrictive diet. As silly as it sounds I've had to mourn my loss of Little Caesars Pizza. No more quick easy and cheap Friday pizza night with my favorite cheapo pizza that had gotten me through so many rough times. And when you tell people that it can make you feel more tired and fatigued some days they never understand what that really means. They are all like: "yah, I hate those days when I am so tired too". And I am sorry you are tired some days, but this is a whole new level of tired. It isn't they "oh I'm depressed and overwhelmed and didn't sleep great last night tired". Those suck and I've had plenty of those days. But this is the "oh I slightly overdid it yesterday and now literally millions of immune cells are flying around my body trying to kill me from the inside out but I'm already doing everything I can possible do to help so I just have to wait and ride out the flare up and hope it doesn't last weeks tired".

Hopefully this helps paint the picture a bit for how me and AI became even better work buddies. Another bit you should know about me is I am historically a bit of a workaholic. I get a lot of my personal satisfaction out of feeling productive and getting stuff done. Which years of that definitely didn't help with my autoimmune disease..

So fast forward a couple months. I'm still alive. I'm on a super strict diet, taking all the supplements known to man and doing all those talked about life style changes. But here I was having a rough week with a flare up. I had so much I had to get done that week, which didn't help with the stress which didn't help with the Hashimoto's. It is such a crappy and visous loop. To feel to tired to work, but wanting to work, but then getting stressed that you didn't work because you were too tired and now you are more stressed which is causing those little warrior immune cells to kick it up another notch and make you even more tired. I could no longer just carelessly pull the effort lever whenever I wanted like I had in the past. I had to carefully expend what limited energy I had to prevent my body from further trying to kill itself. So how do you continue to meet the high demands of your job when your body will periodically decide it can no longer keep pace for days to weeks? Well huge thanks to the smart people that started the potential downfall of humanity with their inventions of AI and tools that made it accessible to people like me. I had been pretty good at keeping up with the latest AI news. And I was already using AI a lot in my day to day but I was just chatting with ChatGPT and copy pasting what it gave me and modifying it as needed. This alone was already incredibly helpful. But I felt too busy to slow down to learn these new tools that I knew could speed me up. So it was only out of pure desperation that I tried Claude code. I had been meaning for try cursor and it and other AI tools for months. Finally I took the 30s to install it and I gave it a try.
Woah, I was blown away(not literally, it is just a CLI command, no MCP server hooked up to my office fan yet). I told it all of the things I had to get done. I told it how it should do it and gave it some examples of how we were doing similar patterns else where and it just went. Best ~$30 I'd ever spent. Which seems like a lot to spend on an AI tool in only a week but it allowed me to do 2-3x what I could normally get done on a good week, and this was not a good week. This was a crap week. I did not have the energy in me to write those dozen new integration endpoints and their associated docs. I did not have the energy to set up a new webhook service for all of our transaction events and set it up so our partners could self serve their access/subscription to these events. But I did have the energy to review the code my wonderful little non-immunocompromised AI buddy. And it wasn't perfect. I still had to offer a good amount of guidance and correction along the way and still had to write a few things myself. But it easily did 90% of the code writing for me(notice I didn't say hard work, I think sometimes the hardest work with coding isn't coding, but figuring out what to actually code </tangent>).

Our code base was pretty small and simple with pretty strict/consistent code which helped a lot. And all of the new features were all things that had established patterns and it was amazing to see the Claude agent find those and copy them so well. To have it be able to continue my work and follow my existing patterns while I sat half dead in my office chair was an amazing moment. The magic of agentic coding wasn’t perfect but this started me off on learning how to better work with it. And it had changed how I work. I’m still writing a lot of my code. I think sometimes you have to do the hard work yourself for some things so you can learn how to do it. Only once you know how to do it yourself are you are able to properly review the code the AI produces.

Fast forward another couple of months and I just started a new job and it’s been overwhelming. I started at same time of my worst flare up yet. So how the heck do I even survive at one of the most demanding companies in my industry when my body can't function at the same level it used to? I wish I could just pull that effort lever and work harder and figure it all out. But I can no longer do that. I need to focus on impact over effort. I need to be as lazy as possible while producing as much value as possible. If I have any hope of surviving in this career with this autoimmune disease then I need to learn how to best leverage AI to help me continue to practice my expertise at the same high levels I am known for.

We all have own own struggles, many of them health. I hope yours are not bad. But odds are in this stressful, expensive world, they probably are. So I really hope AI can continue to improve our living conditions, both on the individual scale like it has me but also on the scale of humanity as a whole. Why does so much of our value have to be tied to what we can contribute to in our jobs?