My old job feels very distant now

Oct 15, 2026 Human written 1c939998Pumpkin on top of Rattlesnake LedgeI can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search results for coding topics went from being useless to useful. Absence of results indicating a “you are holding it wrong” moment. I remember toying with it, and then remember Bryan nagging me “did you ask ChatGPT?” and being constantly annoyed. Until I wasn’t, and that became my default starting point.The next phase came soon after. I had begun copy and pasting code; usually Ruby spec’s I didn’t want to hand write. I’d describe the idioms, or paste in some example code + my new behaviors, and have it spit out the code. This was much faster than typing it into an IDE that did not have code complete enabled the way I was used to in real, typed languages. Sorry, I always hated writing Ruby. Perhaps I would have become fast at writing it eventually, the way the lovers of Rails did. But I couldn’t visualize this future, and ChatGPT provided an escape hatch. The first 5 or 6 languages I used professionally, I learned to love and be efficient with in one way or another. But I’d hit my limit, and now felt justified in delaying learning it better.The next moments came as a pair: Tab completion and using copy-paste on a new domain. Tab completion was more natural. Sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Its key aspect was how it was integrated into the ide I was already familiar with, vscode - forked into Cursor. Picking up the patterns I put down was about all it could do; I rarely if ever relied on its intelligence or actual suggestions.For real suggestions I was still copy pasting ChatGPT. But this was different. before it was merely a more sophisticated auto complete. Now I was fusing Google search + code generation in a new domain: Computer vision in python. I’d moved onto a temporary vision project (boundary and alignment of novel objects); I knew nothing of this. As fast as I could “search”, I prompted my responses into code. This was one of my favorite phases, before the word vomit of later Opus models. ChatGPT would spit out code just the way I liked. Sometimes I just needed a nudge, a specific API or one line snippet. Word vomiting on it and getting a single line back, often with a cheeky insult as I requested. I’d run it in Jupyter notebook and run the code, then tinker and modify it, producing visuals and dots and graphs; simultaneously learning the APIs and the domain while building something.