How I Code (Late 2026 Version)

Programming has changed. How I code now is different from a few months ago

You open a blank .py file in your favourite IDE. You have a blank page in front of you. You start writing code.

This is how it used to be. And perhaps it’s how it still is for you. This is how I wrote computer programs just over half a year ago, too. But things started changing gradually for me earlier in 2026.

Last week, I ran a live course. In the first few minutes of the first live session, I opened a blank .py file in my IDE. There was nothing on my screen. Then I wrote code. Word by word. Line by line.

And about half an hour into this first session, it dawned on me: the last time I had gone through this process of opening a blank file and writing code from scratch was the previous time I had to run a live course a couple of months earlier.

My Agent and I

Every bit of code I had worked on in between these two live courses was written by my AI agent. I was very much involved in those processes, and I read and reviewed lots of code. But I didn’t write any.

Like many, I have mixed feelings about this. I’m getting a lot more done. But I miss the process of writing code, exploring options, putting a project together, function by function, class by class, module by module.

The Coding Gym

I’m going to force myself to write code. I’ll make time for it, as I enjoy it too much and I don’t want to lose the skills and fluency. But it will be like going for a run or lifting weights in the gym. I don’t run because I need to get from point A to point B quickly and I don’t lift weights because I need to move those weights from one place to another. I do those things to keep my body healthy and strong. I’ll code by hand to do the same thing for my mind.

A Real World Example

But let’s go back to how I code now, in late 2026. And let me give you an example of something I worked on last week and used successfully this weekend.

It’s not Python code. It’s a Google Sheets spreadsheet. But that doesn’t matter. The process is the same.

The Scenario

I’m a member of an athletics club (or ‘track and field’, depending on which flavour of English you speak). This weekend we had our club championships and I was tasked to take care of results and overall points. We award a shield for the best track performance and another for the best field performance.

The Pain Point

Last year I was asked to help out at the last minute (and by “last minute” I mean it almost literally, as it was 20 minutes before the meeting started). It was a nightmare. I wasn’t responsible for collating the results, that was done by someone else manually as if it was 1965. I just had to work out their performance points by tapping in lots of numbers into an online calculator using my phone. A laptop would have been easier, but I was only tasked with this job on the day and I only had a phone with me.

This year I had more notice, so I chose to make my life easier... and the whole process smoother.

The Problem

The problem we’re trying to solve…

…is not rocket science. Officials on the track or in the field write results on result sheets and they’re passed on to the result room by a runner. These sheets contain the name of the event, the athletes’ bib numbers, and their performances. So a result slip may look like this:

| Event: U16 Boys 100m-1 |                 |
| ---------------------- | --------------- |
| Athlete                | Performance (s) |
| 23                     | 11.5            |
| 47                     | 11.8            |
| 13                     | 11.9            |

Here’s what happened last year:

• My colleague had to cross-reference bib numbers with a printed-out sheet of registered athletes. She matched names and age groups, then she sorted results into separate sheets for each event and age group.

• I had to look up each athlete’s date of birth from a spreadsheet I’d been given that morning (browsing spreadsheets on a phone screen is not fun), then tap their age, event, and performance into an online calculator, one by one, and write the resulting points on a separate sheet.

The points allow you to compare performances by athletes of different ages in different events, so that we could then find the single best track performance and the single best field performance.

I was already thinking, at last year’s event, of the Python program I could write to automate all of this.

The Solution (I would have never bothered with in 2025)

So, fast-forward to a couple of weeks ago. This time I had some time to come up with something. But I opted to create a Google Sheet instead of a Python program for two reasons:

• It’s much easier for others in the club to use it and share it in the future.

• My usual objection that it’s easier and more fun to write a Python program than create a complex spreadsheet full of linked tabs and formulae didn’t apply. Either way, it was my agent who was going to do the hard work.

And here’s the thing. If I was doing this last year, when I was still coding most things manually (and occasionally opening a ChatGPT window to ask a few things), I still wouldn’t have done this. I wouldn’t have had the time.

But this year was different. Sure, if anything I was busier this year than I was last year. But this year I had agents at my fingertips. Agents who know me and have been working alongside me for a while.

Here’s why I wouldn’t have bothered doing this myself:

• The age group cut-off dates are different for younger age groups (31 August), older age groups (31 December), and Masters athletes (over 35s, where the age group is determined on the day of the competition.)

• There are published points tables to compare performances in different events for senior athletes.

• There are published points tables to compare performances in the same event for older athletes, above 30.

• There are older tables to deal with age comparisons for under 30s

The system needs to take care of all this. None of it is too difficult to write in a Python program or to create one of those power-spreadsheets that link everything together. But it would have required some time and patience, which I didn’t have.

But here’s what I had time for…

I was using an agent I communicate with through Discord, which I also have on my phone. I have a good dictation tool on my phone, too. So in the past week, whenever I was preparing dinner, or waiting in line at the shops, or sitting on the sofa in the evening watching TV, I could have a chat with my agent to guide him (it?) to what I wanted. I knew what I wanted. I just didn’t have the time or desire to do it myself.

And after a few days of these on-and-off conversations, I had a Google Sheet with 20 tabs, including all the points tables for the various scenarios, all the age group rules, all the registered athletes, who-knows-how-many formulae linking columns, rows, and tabs, and, importantly, just two tabs to input results, one for track events and one for field events.

You just enter the event session (selecting from a drop-down menu), the bib number, and the performance. And that’s it. The spreadsheet works out each age group results, the points for each athlete, it shows a live points leaderboard, and so on.

As I said, none of this is rocket science. I know I would have been able to create this spreadsheet by hand, or write Python code that does the same thing. But I would have needed more time. And I wouldn’t have been able to multitask as I did last week.

Oh, and one more thing: I also asked my agent to check the spreadsheet every 15 minutes during our club championships, read the latest results, and post them on a Telegram channel I could share with everyone at the track. So we had live results published online too. I’d never have bothered to set that up manually.

Programming Will Never Be The Same

The real-world example I described above doesn’t represent every programming task I work on with the help of my AI agents. This was a hobby-type project that I probably wouldn’t have worked on otherwise because I didn’t have the time. It wasn’t too difficult, but it would have been time-consuming to do by hand. The stakes weren’t high. Sure, we didn’t want to make mistakes when assigning medals and shields, but it was easy to spot obvious mistakes, and this wasn’t the Olympic Games, either!

I’ll write about other case studies soon, including ones where I was more closely involved in the nitty-gritty of the Python code even though I didn’t write any, nor make any changes to the code by hand.

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Coming Soon… Exploring SOLID Through AI-Assisted Coding

I’m starting a series on the SOLID principles here on The Python Coding Stack soon. I’ll write posts about each of the five principles, and I’ll do it my way, the same style I always use when tackling Python topics.

I’ll also have a series of posts, which will include video, where I’ll work on a project from beginning to end using my AI agent and reviewing the code it writes. This project will meander through several OOP concepts, and you’ll be able to see the SOLID principles come in naturally into the project as solutions to problems we might encounter as the project grows.

Stay tuned.

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How far are you in the traditional-coding-to-AI-coding arc? Leave a comment and let’s compare notes!

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