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Coding In 2026 Doesn’t Look Anything Like 2019
How the AI Era is Rotting Our Engineering Fundamentals and What three days of burning through Claude Code taught me about where our careers are actually headed
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Three days. That’s how long it took me to burn through $200 in API costs on top of my $100 Claude max plan while working on a client’s project to get a production-ready RAG system completed. The deadline was getting close, and I’d already exhausted my weekly quota before that. At one point, I was just sitting there watching the bill go up and thinking, this is insane. And then I realized this is also exactly how the job works now.
That week gave me a kind of AI psychosis (the cognitive shock), in a good way, not the panic kind. The kind where you suddenly see how fast the ground has shifted under a role you’ve spent years building. Coding in 2026 is not coding in 2019. It’s not even close. And most of the conversation happening online about this still hasn’t caught up to what’s actually true on the ground.
Here’s what I mean, and why it matters for anyone building a career in this field right now.
