The Evolution of the AI-Driven Coder

In the past year many of us developers have evolved from being skeptical of AI tools to fully embracing them and their benefits. For much of 2025 I wrote code the old fashioned way; getting a ticket, thinking about its requirements and what parts of the codebase I'd need to make changes in. In some tasks, I'd need to look extra hard to ensure my changes don't impact components and services on the other side of the repo. Sure, a statically-typed language would help guide me through a lot of big refactoring. And yes test coverage is also great to have, but I'd still need to go through and do the work. I'd need to make the updates, run the tests, fix the tests, potentially add more tests, run the linters, fix the linter issues, write a nice commit message that is helpful to whoever looks at this code later, push, make a PR, oops we need to rebase on someone else's conflicting changes, push again forcefully, and then get someone to review it. Now, if we take into account all of these proce