27 years ago, at the age of 13, I was writing games by hand in Z80 assembly language for the TI-86 calculator.

Now THAT’s a nerd for you!

I remember trying to make custom fonts and trying to turn computer graphics into 1s and 0s for my game screens, and creating my own custom sprite animations by hand.

One of my happiest memories of that time was when I figured out how to compress the size of my sprites in half by rotating the bits over to free up extra space, since the calculators had such little memory and so few registers to store information.

Solving a problem like that gave me immense joy! And yes, I was very, very popular, obviously. Cough.

But there were many problems I never solved back then. I tried to make a skiing game, and I could never get the collision detection to work right. So after months of frustration, I abandoned the project, never releasing the game.

Flash forward to today, and thanks to AI, I get that feeling of “programming joy” daily as I solve yet another problem I thought I could never solve.

In many ways, my work and life hasn’t changed much since then. I’m still pushing pixels 27 years later, only the amount of them has changed along with an incredible wealth of new tools.

But no tool in 27 years has ever been as exciting as Claude Code.

The number of times I get stuck on a problem and want to bang my head on a wall has gone down to near zero over the last year, vs. daily, 27 years ago.

If you’re not excited by AI, you’re probably not using it to solve the right kind of problems.

I’m not saying taking a picture of your fridge and asking it to meal prep for you is BAD, but… well you get the idea.