[formrecap]

VSCode + Claude Code. The combination works well for solo development — Claude handles the implementation, I handle the architecture and judgment calls.

A few things I've learned:

Tests were important before AI and are even more important now. AI can introduce unintended outcomes in subtle ways, so having a strong test suite isn't optional — it's your safety net against changes you didn't fully review.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. AI makes it trivially easy to refactor, swap frameworks, rebuild entire modules. But it doesn't mean you should rework everything daily to chase the newest JS framework. Restraint matters more now, not less.

The biggest limitation: AI follows patterns from the most common repos. For standard work that's fine — often it's exactly what you need. But when you hit what I'd call "unsolved problems" — things that don't have an industry-accepted solution yet — AI falls apart. It'll confidently generate something that looks right but isn't. That's where knowing how to plan, prompt with the right context, and recognise when the output is wrong becomes the actual skill.