A developer has published a personal reflection on the first 40 months since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, documenting their evolving relationship with AI coding tools and the technology’s practical limitations.
The anonymous author describes their initial experience with ChatGPT, noting how it immediately stood out from earlier chatbots like Cleverbot. “ChatGPT was better, much better. So much so that it was immediately obvious that this was not going to be just another toy for internet nerds, the rest of the world was going to notice,” they write.
The post details specific coding experiments, including an early project to create an MTG card placeholder generator using Claude. The developer describes a “vibe-coding” approach where they prompted the AI to “create an app that would fetch for the card metadata from an API, generate a qrcode, and correctly layout this information into a printable page of cards.” However, they found that through each iteration, they “replaced more of what the bot wrote with my own code” until “the final result hardly used any AI generated code at all.”
More recently, the author purchased a Claude Pro subscription and began using Claude Code, describing it as “a brand new form of input and control of my computer along side my keyboard, mouse, and even command line terminal.” They characterize this use case as “unambiguously good, useful, and just amazing,” expressing hope that “this technology become fully commoditized.”
The reflection captures the mixed practical experience many developers have reported with AI coding tools—initial excitement followed by recognition of limitations, but with specific use cases proving genuinely valuable. The post was published March 28, 2026, marking nearly 40 months since ChatGPT’s initial release.
