Since November, the author has logged into a personal Claude Max account and paired Claude Code, Claude Opus 4.5, and occasional OpenAI Codex runs to churn out fifty prototype projects. A former hobbyist who’s tinkered with BASIC, Python and Godot, he spent two COVID‑bound months turning ideas into playable demos, including a multiplayer Katamari Damacy clone.

AI agents behave like consumer‑grade 3D printers: they spit out functional snippets fast but inherit patterns from training data, leaving durability and scalability to the builder. Crafting maintainable production code, managing dependencies, or inventing truly novel architectures still demands seasoned judgment, something the current models lacks despite impressive prototypes.

Veteran developers needn’t fear immediate displacement; instead, AI tools are likely to amplify workloads, handling boilerplate while humans focus on system design and debugging. Anthropic’s recent 2× Claude usage cap and similar incentives hint at a growing market for paid developer assistants. Watch for tighter integration into IDEs and enterprise CI pipelines.