---
altdown: 1
canonical: https://www.vivekchopra.com/posts/ai-coding-changed
title: Something Has Changed With AI Coding
published: 2026-03-03T00:00:00Z
updated: 2026-03-03T00:00:00Z
lang: en
author: Vivek Chopra
description: My view on AI coding tools has shifted. On spec-driven development and what Claude Opus 4.6 actually feels like to use.
signals: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=no
generator: vivekchopra.com-gen
---
# Something Has Changed With AI Coding

## Key takeaways

- Spec-driven development changed how I work with AI tools: the model reasons against a living specification instead of guessing intent.
- Claude Opus 4.6 felt like a different category of model rather than an incremental step.
- Donald Knuth's paper "Claude's Cycles" describes Opus 4.6 solving an open graph theory problem he had worked on for weeks in about an hour.

For most of the past year, my view on AI coding tools was somewhat old-fashioned: great for prototyping, but not something I would trust with production code without a fair amount of rewriting.

Something has changed over the past two months.

The first thing is a formalization of how to actually do development with AI tools that I've been playing with: [spec-driven development](https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-development-with-ai-get-started-with-a-new-open-source-toolkit/). Rather than just prompting and iterating, you invest upfront in a living specification to capture intent, and use that to drive the implementation. It changes the dynamic considerably. Instead of the AI guessing what you want, it has something to reason against.

More fundamentally though, it is the models themselves.

Claude Opus 4.6 in particular feels like a different category, not just an incremental improvement. Seems I'm not the only one who thinks so. Professor Knuth just published a paper titled ["Claude's Cycles"](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf) describing how Opus 4.6 solved an open graph theory problem he had been working on for several weeks, in about an hour. He ends the paper with "Hats off to Claude!"

Clearly, I'm not the only one noticing this!