What We Talk About When We Talk About Code

February 22, 2026

I haven’t done too much with AI. At least, not until recently. I dabbled a bit, with ChatGPT – but dabbling is probably the important word to focus on.

I used Adobe’s generative fill way back when. And used AI to generate some promo posters for my “Candy Grabber” Halloween project.

At the height of my use, I used ChatGPT as a kind of bespoke endpoint, to power a rudimentary “Choose Your Own Adventure” game I called Infinite Adversaries.

But honestly – not much since then.

At work, we’ve gotten more access to AI. And the more I see coworkers utilizing it, the more I realized I’ve been falling behind. And so I started to explore a bit more, both on the clock at work and off the clock at home.

In addition to exploring Vercel’s AI SDK, I started to actively use Claude Code.

It’s been… interesting. So far, I’ve been taking a backseat and trying to prompt Claude to do most of the work… opting to occasionally go in to do manual edits. But preferring to tell Claude what to fix.

At the moment, the requests I’m making are fairly benign. Creating dumb components, a lot of standalone stuff.

I’ve got a project that I’m working on that is pretty exciting to me (it’s still in a very abstract phase). And I think the more complex things get, the more I’ll be interested to see how Claude handles things.

I’d say that I’m having fun coding, but I’m not quite doing that much coding at the moment. I’m mostly talking to Claude about coding. Which I guess counts as kind of the same thing?

I’m reminded of what all us folks at the MFA program at OSU used to say: talking about writing counts as writing.

AI coding

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