AI coding in 2025 changed how I build software.

Patrick Campanale says developments in 2025 — notably IDE-integrated models and tools such as Google's Antigravity — made AI a practical aid for writing, debugging and testing code, and helped him build multiple apps more quickly than before.

Patrick Campanale, a long-time tech writer and maker, says 2025 changed how he uses AI for software development. He previously found early AI code generation error-prone and tedious to integrate. Later developments, especially tighter integration with IDEs and new models, made the tools more useful to him. He reports now using AI for file creation, edits, compilation checks and iterative debugging. Key points: - Early AI experiments in 2024 and early 2025 produced code with many errors and required a lot of manual copying and pasting. - Mid-to-late 2025 brought stronger IDE integrations; Campanale cites Google’s Antigravity release as a turning point that made AI more practical inside his workflow. - He describes AI tools that can create or edit files, run terminal commands, compile code, report success or failure, and iterate on fixes without constant manual intervention. - Using these tools, he built a laser-engraving materials management website with ReactJS, Supabase for auth/database, and Cloudflare R2 for object storage in roughly 8–10 hours of development work. - He also used an LLM (he reports using Claude Opus) to generate a feature-parity iPhone app from a brief prompt after creating an Xcode project core, and rebuilt a Dark Sky–style weather app and a budget app in short sessions. - He notes that projects still required design, prototyping, testing and debugging time and that a single prompt does not yet produce a finished product. Summary: Campanale views 2025 as a turning point where AI moved from producing low-quality outputs to becoming a practical assistant inside development environments. He expects continued growth in AI-assisted programming in 2026 and describes his current work as replacing some paid services and accelerating app development.