It’s been almost 2 years since I last posted to this blog. Since then, related to the world of software development, two things have changed:
- I’ve been working at a large game company as a Senior Software Engineer on one of the technology teams; it’s nothing short of a total blast working with the people on my team.
- The dawn of agentic coding has arrived on the software scene, and knowledge work in general.
It’s terrifying and exciting times to be a software developer. I hope to document each step along the way.
(Skip to the bottom if you just want the ‘fun stuff’ 😀)
I started using coding assistants only recently. In November 2025, a coworker demonstrated GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code to team members. He was amazed at how quickly he could get working prototypes up and running. At first, I found it interesting, but as his demonstration continued, I too was amazed.
Over November and December, the team independently started experimenting with coding assistants to see what they could do, what mistakes they would make, and what best practices we could devise for using them in production code.
In December, we shipped our first AI-assisted project, weeks ahead of schedule and with better documentation than in many prior projects.
By January and February 2026, we were routinely using AI to explore and document older codebases, as well as to assist with maintenance and modernization efforts. We even began investigating ways to use AI for reducing accumulated technical debt…ironically, since one common complaint about AI agents is that they add to a codebase’s technical debt.
As of March 1, 2026, all team members use coding AI as an efficiency tool at work on a daily basis. All of us are also pursuing side projects after hours, experimenting with AI coding agents to push their limits, identify where they fail, and determine where they add value. Several of us have created functional web apps that solve problems we had long intended to address through traditional development but never found the time for. And all of us are working on passion projects—mostly game-related—that would traditionally require several programmers and artists weeks to prototype, but which can now be prototyped in several nights by one software engineer.
In the coming weeks, I will present some of these passion projects. I will also provide posts on the best ways to fully and deeply understand—or “grok”—Large Language Models and agentic AI, so that you do not have to treat them as black boxes and can more fully grasp their problems and usefulness in software development.
Additionally, I will blog about the societal implications of the rapid rise of AI in general, with thoughts on how to not only survive but thrive, and what to teach your children to do the same.
For now, I will present a one-off project that I created on a whim last night. A coworker was investigating realistic gem rendering on screen. He considered existing game engines, including Godot and Unity, to give him a head start. He used AI to assist, but he was not getting the results he wanted in Godot, so he switched to Unity. He reported decent results—this was Friday, two days ago—but I suggested he look into web-based technologies, as they would provide cross-platform availability out of the box.
That night, I wondered how easy it would be to create a web-based gem renderer. While half-watching TV with my wife and daughter, I decided to have Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet help me develop one. I wrote a detailed software specification, omitting the rendering technologies so that the AI could recommend them. I then had Claude Opus create the plan and Claude Sonnet execute it.
The result is a web app, using three.js, that renders gemstones in real time:
The live website has the gem autorotating in real time, and you can use the mouse and mouse button to see different orientations of the gem. You can also switch gems (Diamond, Sapphire, Emerald, Citrine) and change some of the render parameters using on screen sliders.
Want to see it in action and try it out? The live website is here : https://rgmarquez.github.io/gem-render/
The GitHub repo is here : https://github.com/rgmarquez/gem-render
The Developer Chronicles 