(Last) summer of code?

It is lovely to have fantastic summer weather, lowered shoulders and a little time for side projects every evening once the kids are in bed. Last year, as in earlier years, I mostly sat and coded a bit by hand; now it is quite different. I may not write much code by hand in any summer from now on, whatsoever.

It is about half a year since LLMs tipped over from hindrance to help for me. Obviously subjective, depending on experience and domain.

Now I notice a new watershed. Both Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol are good enough to work independently for long stretches. It is strange to watch it drive the machine itself: installing the programs it needs and talking to them through an MCP it rigged up on its own. I don’t know Unreal Engine particularly well, for example. But Sol does, and now I have an Unreal project running on my machine.

I can still add value on structure and architecture. But the nagging feeling is there:

For how long?