Antoine Lehurt

I’ve been chasing better code since I started programming. Every review, every refactor, every late realization that last month’s approach was wrong, that was the craft. An infinite loop of learning, and I was always hungry for the next iteration.

Then an agent started writing code that looked a lot like mine. At first, it wasn’t good enough. The output was close but not something I’d ship, and I spent more time fixing than I would have writing it myself.

But the models got better. Opus 4 was a real jump. I started delegating the coding part entirely, and for a while it felt like I’d just gotten faster. Then the review cycles started piling up. Back and forth, back and forth. The agent wasn’t wrong exactly, it just wasn’t making the choices I would have made, because I hadn’t told it to.

That’s when the work shifted. I started planning more deliberately than I ever had when the code came from my own hands, spelling out architecture and tradeoffs and exactly how something should feel to use. Decisions I used to make silently while typing, from instinct. The agent can’t work from instinct. It needs that precision. And putting it down, finding the words for what I used to just know, that was a skill I’d never needed before.

I was never just writing software. Nobody using it cares who typed it.

I was building something for a person, inside the constraints of a business, and the code was one tool I reached for among several. A tool I still care about (I’d be lying if I said otherwise), but never the whole job.

I’m still chasing better code. I just don’t type it anymore.