Scribblings of a Seeker 
From Skeptic To Advocate, How AI won me over
I dismissed AI coding assistants for the same reason I disable IDE tab-completion: I don’t want a machine second-guessing my intent. For years, GitHub Copilot was just another chatbot generating code I wouldn’t commit, offering suggestions I’d ignore. I turned it off and moved on.
Then I started a new job with a fullstack Vue.js codebase. New patterns, new conventions, new component architecture, and a team that expected me to ship in weeks, not months. My usual method of slowly mapping a system by hand wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to get up to speed fast, and for the first time, I was willing to trade my purism for productivity.
By 2026, I had access to every AI assistant on the market: Cursor, Copilot, Claude, and more. It was time to pick one.
I started with Cursor. It was fast and convenient, until I asked it to generate Vue composables. It produced functions with unnecessary nested conditionals that violated our existing patterns and coding standards. I spent more time refactoring its output than I would have spent writing it myself. The promise of ‘AI-assisted coding’ became ‘configuration management with extra steps.’
After a month of struggling with Cursor, I finally gave up on it and moved on to Claude Code. Claude Code’s terminal experience intrigued me, but its token-based pricing created friction for my exploratory workflow. I found myself hesitating before running commands, calculating whether a query was ‘worth’ the cost. While workarounds like Open-Router exist, I wanted a tool that let me experiment freely without mental accounting. Claude Code is powerful, but its pricing model didn’t match my after-hours tinkering needs.
What won me over was OpenCode. It came up in engineering meetups, and more developers were switching over. So I decided to give it a shot.
OpenCode eliminated the setup friction and came with no paywall. As an open-source project, it offered free models out of the box that were surprisingly capable. Since it’s written in TypeScript, my bread and butter, I knew I could dig into the source if I ever needed to. But what hooked me was model flexibility: I could swap in Claude’s models or any other without losing my settings. The tool adapts to me, not the other way around.
That flexibility solved my real problem, Procrastination on personal projects that had been dormant for years. Like most professionals who work a 9-6 job, you’re mentally exhausted by 6 PM and just want to relax. The thought of more boilerplate coding to get your project off the ground simply puts you off it.
OpenCode as my coding agent, along with OpenSpec (a lightweight spec-driven framework I used to plan and scaffold the digital garden) gave me a full-fledged workflow that made developing and solving problems fun again. I did not have to worry about setting up a project or fixing type errors. I could focus on visualising my plan and work on solutions rather than the tedious process of getting started. Don’t get me wrong, someone starting to learn a new technology, the process of setting up something from scratch can be very rewarding. But for someone with a full-time job, who is coding 8-9 hours a day at work, to come home and to think I have another 5-6 hours of coding to actually get to the fun part is a deal breaker, and that’s the reason I kept procrastinating on most of my projects. But not anymore. Over the last two months, I have been managing my coding assistant, learning how to effectively use it and be more productive with it. And the result - my personal digital garden is no longer an unused domain anymore scribblings-of-a-seeker is up, and exactly how I visualised it.
The website was not an overnight vibe-coded miracle. The home page alone took me two weeks of tinkering after work to get it to the point where it is currently, and I am very proud of it.
The main star of my home page is the stellar knowledge graph. I always wanted to set up a digital garden, originally inspired by Maggie Appleton’s Digital Garden and her article A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. I used to maintain a bullet journal in a physical notebook, and recently switched over to Obsidian. One of my favourite features of Obsidian is the graph view, the ability to see your notes and ideas connected visually, which always intrigued me and motivated me to write more. So it was only fair to bring that same concept to my website. I wanted to have a stellar aspect to my digital garden. So I started by exploring this idea with OpenSpec’s exploration mode, outlining how to bring Obsidian’s graph view to a web context. After some refinement, I had a clear implementation plan ready to execute. It did take a few iterations and editing, but the final result was worth it. Could I have built this without AI? Probably. Could I have started? Not at 9 PM on a Tuesday after a day of production incidents. OpenCode didn’t make me a better developer; it made me a developer who actually shows up.
AI hasn’t replaced my coding skills; it’s removed the friction that kept me from using them. After ten years in web development, I know what I want to build; OpenCode just helps me start building it sooner. For experienced developers, the right AI tool isn’t a crutch. It’s a way to spend your limited time on work that matters. I’m shipping projects I used to procrastinate on, and I’m enjoying the process again.
If you would like to learn more about how to get started with OpenCode checkout my guide to getting-started-with-opencode followed by openspec-and-spec-driven-development-a-practical-guide.