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Before I forget how I got here...

Rich Haase on January 29, 2026

I'm not sure if this is a blog post, a journal entry, or a personal time capsule. Everything in the world of AI and agentic coding is moving so fa...
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Richard Pascoe

Really enjoyed reading this - I can’t say I’ve worked with vibe coding or all the tooling you mentioned, but I appreciated the way you laid out your journey and the lessons you’ve picked up along the way. It’s always interesting to see how people grow their process and perspective over time, and I look forward to seeing what you write next!

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Rich Haase

Thanks Richard. I'm trying my best to record my thoughts during this interesting time in tech if for no other reason than that I'm afraid I will forget the details! I'm glad you enjoyed the read.

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Richard Pascoe

Pretty much the same reason I joined DEV and am posting about my journey with freeCodeCamp - to hopefully not forget the details!

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Ali-Funk

Man ! There is some really eye opening stuff in here. Why ? Because I see so much of myself on this post.
I am saving it for later so I can read it again.

I was very skeptical of AI myself. Now I use it like google and for studying and for creating my own stuff.

AI really did change my perspective and you did an outstanding job explaining your own experience with AI.

Outstanding work! Keep posting!

Disclaimer: this post was written by a human

Error 404; AI unresponsive; terminated session

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Rich Haase

I think AI skepticism is the approach to all AI tools, regardless of how useful I have personally found them so far. These are amazingly powerful and useful tools and approaching them with skepticism is appropriate.

My first post about AI a couple of years ago was all about trying to get ChatGPT to write Conway's Game of Life , a simple program, and something I've written dozens of times myself), and it struggled.

This week while I was sick with the flu I wrote a web app to help me graph knowledge concepts and use AI as a teaching tool. It did it in a day and I did little more than course correct and set architecture/goals.

Your mileage may vary, but I can tell you with confidence that you should try these tools out and see what you find.

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Ali-Funk

For coding and leaning to code : is chat gpt your tool of choice?
I am a AI sceptic ever since my AI started hallucinating about made up events or things that just didn’t make sense. But my AI (Gemini) kept insisting on it. It annoyed me to much I stoped using it for a while.

For coding in python (a script I used for a AWS Lambda function) it worked flawlessly.

But I used to use chat gpt a year ago and since have switched to Gemini.

You said you have made posts on dev.to years ago ? I honored to met a dev.to veteran. I only started recently sharing my story

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Rich Haase

Oh, I'm brand new to dev.to. A coworkers suggested I published my blog posts here and figured I would give it a try. This is this first thing I have published on dev.

I use Claude Code primarily, but I also use Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and others occasionally. I use Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT on the web for their strengths, e.g. nano banana in Gemini for image generation.

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Ali-Funk

Thank you very much for this info and the general chat on here. I did start a month ago and found I like creating my own content instead of reading other people’s content. Quite a revelation to be honest.
I hope you keep posting on dev.to

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Vasu Ghanta

Loved this raw, honest chronicle of your agentic coding evolution from VSCode leaps to Zellij mastery and EDD hilarity—super inspiring for terminal tinkerers like me!

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Rich Haase

Thanks Vasu. Opus 4.5 has really helped with the EDD. I find I have much less cause for swearing at the agents these days.

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Derek Cheng

Awesome journey, so fun to read! I'm curious if you still find Codex to be best. The fact that it goes away heads down for so long is a challenge I find...

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Rich Haase

I’ve returned to using Claude Code primarily. I still use Codex for some tasks like its code review. The shift for me was the release of opus 4.5. I’m always exploring and trying the other vibe coding tools when I hear about something promising, so in a couple month I expect to write about how Gemini or Grok are suddenly the model to use.