Over the past 25 years, I’ve developed for the web using just about everything — starting with ASP, moving through PHP, C#/.NET, and of course, Ruby on Rails before circling back to C#.

After more than a decade away from Rails, a video about Rails 8.0 caught my eye last year, and I decided to give it another go in my “spare time” — something I’ve had plenty of recently. Around the same time, AI coding assistants began taking off, and I stumbled across Cursor, which quickly became my companion in rediscovering the craft.

Fast forward into 2025, and “vibe coding” — this new blend of human creativity and AI-assisted development — has exploded. Startups are boasting incredible ARR growth and valuations, seemingly overnight.

It’s fascinating to watch, but also a reminder that while AI makes it feel like anyone can code, there’s still a lot that sits around the edges — the structure, the strategy, the maintainability. Don’t get me wrong: AI is an incredible assistant. It helps me learn new techniques and handle repetitive tasks with ease. But it can just as easily veer off track if not guided well. That’s where experience comes in — knowing how to shape a product and build it sustainably still matters just as much as ever.

As part of my Rails reboot, I spent six months building a Studio Management Tool for architects — purely as an exercise. It didn’t go anywhere commercially, but it was an invaluable project to relearn the framework, explore the new AI workflows, and, honestly, to just enjoy coding again.

AI assistance has also helped me beyond that experiment — it allowed me to quickly get back up to speed with PHP for a short-term contract earlier this year. The combination of prior experience and AI guidance made ramping up far faster than it would have been even a few years ago.

And while Studio Manager might have stayed on the shelf, the lessons learned haven’t. I’ve applied that knowledge and am now developing a couple of new SaaS tools — more on those soon, but they’re directly inspired by what I’ve rediscovered through this whole process.