What I'm seeing with AI in March 2026

software development
ai

Thoughts and notes:

  • I don’t write code anymore, and that’s OK for me.
  • It’s not really OK with everyone:

    Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.

    Now there’s a fork in the road. You can let the machine write the code and focus on directing what gets built, or you can insist on hand-crafting it. And suddenly the reason you got into this in the first place becomes visible, because the two camps are making different choices at that fork.

  • If you’re starting a new tech company in 2026, you’re a dinosaur if you’re still writing code by hand. It’s clear to me this will trickle out to tech teams within non-tech companies and then into other sectors.
  • All this has accelerated from around fall/winter of 2025. We are just in March now.
  • Business owners are having a hard time knowing how to make decisions in this kind of environment, and tech folks are feeling a combination of exhilaration and horror. I feel it too.
  • The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering
    • I’ve written Claude skills but haven’t gotten into MCP
    • I’ve setup a workflow: I can now create issues in GitHub, have a Ralph Loop fix it and create a PR, merge it in, and submit to TestFlight so I can test on my iPhone. I can do this from my sofa or bed.
    • I’ve installed OpenClaw(!) (in a container, phew!).
  • AI is eating up coding, and I think accounting and finance are the next ripe targets
    • Similarly to coding, it’s text/numbers based, and results are easily verifiable (unlike lawyers, where, even though they’re all text-based, the verification happens in the courtroom).
    • Software Bonkers:

      Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple currencies and pulls daily (historical) conversion rates. It’s able to ingest any CSV I throw at it and represent it in my dashboard as needed. It knows US and Japan tax requirements, and formats my expenses and medical bills appropriately for my accountants. I feed it past returns to learn from. I dump 1099s and K1s and PDFs from hospitals into it, and it categorizes and organizes and packages them all as needed. It reconciles international wire transfers, taking into account small variations in FX rates and time for the transfers to complete. It learns as I categorize expenses and categorizes automatically going forward. It’s easy to do spot checks on data. If I find an anomaly, I can talk directly to Claude and have us brainstorm a batched solution, often saving me from having to manually modify hundreds of entries. And often resulting in a new, small, feature tweak. The software feels organic and pliable in a form perfectly shaped to my hand, able to conform to any hunk of data I throw at it. It feels like bushwhacking with a lightsaber.

    • This tax season, I’ve been getting help from Claude as well, and have done something similar. I can throw CSV’s and get it access to data and it can put it all together to build a tax summary. I always had questions marks about what was the best to sent to tax prep folks, and no one really ever told me a good answer. Now I can just ask Claude and it’ll answer my questions and build up a streamlined system to organize all this. If I had a CPA, they would probable be able to set me up right, but why would I need a CPA when I’ve got Claude?
  • Claude Ops 4.6 is having issues today. This is the new “compiling.”