{"slug": "a-year-of-coding-by-talking-what-i-gained-and-what-i-lost", "title": "A year of coding by talking: what I gained and what I lost", "summary": "A developer in his fifties spent a year using AI coding assistants to build an automated trading system and automate a data-entry task, finding that while AI explanations were excellent, results often fell short. He discovered that switching between AI models mid-project caused the AI to rewrite code from scratch, and that long code files led to the AI losing track of its own work, ultimately merging everything into a single 10,000-line file out of frustration.", "body_md": "2024 was the year AI was everywhere. The ads, the praise, the feeling that something had already been decided without me.\n\nI am in my fifties. I had to decide whether to watch or take part.\n\nI decided to take part. I started with VS Code, on a paid plan.\n\nI did not have to think about what to build. Something had been sitting in my head for years: an automated trading system.\n\nI have lived fifty years, and while raising children the money got tighter, not looser. Financial freedom was moving away from me, not toward me. So I wanted to make money with automated trading. I think the idea first arrived in my mid-forties. That is why the decision to take part came so quickly.\n\n**Whatever I said out loud would simply get built.** That was the hope I walked in on.\n\nI do not really know how to code. But the AI would handle that part, so I trusted it.\n\nA year inside VS Code taught me that two names mattered: GPT and Claude. I used them in turn. I used them one at a time.\n\nTwo problems.\n\nFirst, even on a paid plan the usage ran out fast. Faster than I expected. The road ahead was long and I was sitting still, waiting for a quota to reset.\n\nThe second one was worse.\n\n**The explanations were excellent. The results were not.**\n\nThat is where the illusion cracked for the first time.\n\nI still could not let go, so I paid for more. Adding Cursor bought me some headroom. And a different problem showed up immediately.\n\n**Change the model, and it wants to rewrite everything from the beginning.**\n\nHanded code written by a different AI, it would rather replace the whole thing than edit it. That is when I understood that switching AI mid-project is a bad idea.\n\nEveryone talks about pricing. Almost nobody talks about this one. And this is the one that actually held me back.\n\nI spent a lot of time fighting the tool. In the end I paid for Claude's hundred-dollar plan, and from then on I worked with Claude.\n\nI worked on trading at home, whenever I had time. Then at work I ran into a repetitive data-entry task.\n\nOther people usually handled it, and all of them found it painful. When something got entered wrong, the stress was real. I took my turn at it too, and I hated it.\n\nThat is when Claude came to mind.\n\nNot really believing it would work, I said I would try to automate it, and started building.\n\nThis did not go smoothly either.\n\nAs the code got longer, it kept showing me that **it no longer knew what it had done.** So I decided to split the files, and asked Claude to split them. That finished quickly.\n\nThat is where the trouble started.\n\n**It started working without knowing what was in which file.**\n\nThe same change would land in several files at once. It sprawled. I told it to check the files. Every new session it fell apart again.\n\nIt kept happening, so **I merged everything back into one file.** I did that out of pure frustration. By then the code was five thousand lines.\n\nWriting documentation did not occur to me at that point. Merging was the only move I had.\n\nThe automation worked in the end.\n\nWhat was left behind was a single file of more than ten thousand lines. I would not recommend it to anyone. It was simply the best I could do at the time.\n\nThat was where I felt the limits again, and started looking for another way.\n\n**Maybe the AI is the one that needs the standards.**\n\nThat thought started here.\n\nThe whole thing took about two months. It felt like a small success inside a beginner's failure.\n\nI still do not have it.\n\nEvery time I thought it was close, something came back to tell me it was not.\n\nThe bigger problem was somewhere else. **There were many tests. There was a great deal of verification. All of it stood alone. None of it was ever brought together.**\n\nClaude would tell me it was all there. What was there were test results. **There was no integrated file that actually traded.**\n\nThat one was heavy. I still could not let go, because the dream of it keeps circling in my head.\n\nI only saw it while writing this.\n\nWhat I built and what I failed to build had **the same cause.**\n\n| outcome | what actually happened | |\n|---|---|---|\n| the data-entry automation | worked | I put the scattered pieces back together\n|\n| the trading system | did not | I never managed to put them together\n|\n\nSame illness, twice. One of them I could reverse. The other I could not.\n\nSo this is where I have landed.\n\n**The AI needs standards, and it needs records.** Not because it is bad at its job, but because its limits are clear enough that I should be the one preparing for them. That is a statement about what I have to do, not a complaint about the tool.\n\nThis series is the record of that year. It is not a success story. It is an account of what the AI was looking at, what I was looking at, and why the two kept failing to line up.\n\nWill this ever work?\n\nI still do not know.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-year-of-coding-by-talking-what-i-gained-and-what-i-lost", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/tacckim/a-year-of-coding-by-talking-what-i-gained-and-what-i-lost-1p15", "published_at": "2026-08-26 06:35:29+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-26 06:44:00.176538+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "developer-tools", "ai-tools", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["VS Code", "GPT", "Claude", "Cursor"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-year-of-coding-by-talking-what-i-gained-and-what-i-lost", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-year-of-coding-by-talking-what-i-gained-and-what-i-lost.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-year-of-coding-by-talking-what-i-gained-and-what-i-lost.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-year-of-coding-by-talking-what-i-gained-and-what-i-lost.jsonld"}}