How development changed through the decades

2006

Small LCD monitors were not yet common; most people still used CRTs
Yellowed keyboards and ball mice
The sound of a 56K modem
CDs were widely used; USB flash drives were just becoming common
Borland Delphi, Visual Studio
People wrote their own code, reading documentation and manuals

2016

Everyone had LCD monitors
Modern keyboards and laser mice
100 Mbit networks at work and home
Files were stored in the cloud; flash drives were being lost and discs felt nostalgic
IntelliJ IDEA, Sublime Text
People wrote code by copying from StackOverflow, hoping the questions matched

2026

Many have ultrawide curved monitors or two 27" screens
Mechanical keyboards with magnetic switches, MX Master mice, and trackpads
100 Mbit mobile network speeds
Everything lives in the cloud; younger people don’t recognise the “Save” icon
Cursor, Claude Code / Codex, Zed / VS Code
StackOverflow lies quiet; people don’t write code — they write prompts for code agents

Modern development workflow

From my point of view, it looks roughly like this:

Create a plan with a coding agent
Iterate on the plan for a long time, adjusting the parts I don’t like
Ask the coding agent to implement the plan
Run the code, check the logs and review the code
Request fixes for anything unsatisfactory
Have another coding agent perform a review
Address the review comments
Commit the changes

If you are focused and strong enough, you can run several of these flows in parallel to use the LLM's reasoning and generating time efficiently. I usually use git worktree and a separate agent instance for this.