A year of coding with Gen AI: 1.4B+ tokens later
Lessons from a year of building with Cursor and Gen AI — what 1.4 billion+ tokens of real development work taught me about agentic workflows.
When I started using Cursor in June, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Fast-forward a year: 1.4B+ tokens later, and my engineering workflow has fundamentally changed.
Cursor is my main AI-based IDE, but I also use GitHub Copilot on VS Code and I’m experimenting with Google’s Antigravity. Each tool has its place, and the combination is powerful.
I stopped treating AI as a helper and started treating it as a force multiplier. The shift happened when I realized I was spending less time on boilerplate and more time on architecture and problem-solving.
I built 3 apps in the last 15 days. Not because I had to, but because I could. The speed of iteration changed everything. I also created 20+ AI agents that improve both the quality and quantity of my code—each one a small automation that compounds over time.
The teams winning with AI aren’t the ones using it occasionally. They’re the ones who’ve integrated it into their daily workflow, learned its strengths and limitations, and built systems around it.
If you’re on the fence about AI coding tools, start small, measure impact, and scale what works. The productivity gains are real—and they compound.
happy coding :)
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