I've been writing less lately—work's been demanding, but in the best possible way. We're knee-deep in some fascinating technical challenges that have completely shifted how I think about code maintenance and development tooling.

The Cursor Revolution

Cursor has become my default IDE, and I haven't looked back at VS Code since making the switch. While both editors use similar underlying language models, Cursor's implementation of AI-assisted coding feels fundamentally different. The tab completion is more contextually aware, and the AI integration flows naturally within the development workflow rather than feeling like a bolted-on feature.

I've also been experimenting with Warp.dev, though with mixed results. Despite claims that it can replace Jupyter notebooks for certain workflows, I find the interface clunky and the experience less polished than traditional notebook environments. The promise is there, but the execution isn't quite ready for my use cases yet.

The Case for Starting Fresh

Here's the counterintuitive insight that's been shaping our development approach: scaffolding from scratch is often more efficient than modifying existing code. This realization came when we needed to rebuild several pages after introducing a new entity to our data model. Rather than painstakingly updating each existing implementation, we opted to rebuild everything from the ground up.

The results were surprising. Not only was the rebuild faster, but it allowed us to leverage modern frameworks and patterns that would have been difficult to retrofit into the existing codebase. We weren't constrained by previous architectural decisions or forced to work around technical debt accumulated over time.

Why UI Development Has Become "Cheap"

User interface development today is fundamentally different from even five years ago. The combination of improved tooling, mature component libraries, and advances in CSS has dramatically reduced the cost of building interfaces from scratch.

Much of our codebase predates TypeScript adoption, with some components still using Flow type annotations. The transition to TypeScript as the standard has opened opportunities to evaluate and adopt the most relevant modern tools. React's ecosystem has matured significantly, and libraries like TanStack Query offer elegant solutions to problems we used to solve with complex custom implementations.

The Economics of Technical Debt

When facing a significant redesign, the math often favors rebuilding over modification. Legacy code carries invisible costs: outdated dependencies, deprecated patterns, and architectural assumptions that no longer hold. Starting fresh allows teams to apply lessons learned, use current best practices, and build on solid foundations.

This isn't universally true—some systems are too critical or complex to rebuild safely. But for user interfaces and feature-specific code, the threshold for "rebuild vs. refactor" has shifted significantly toward rebuilding.

Looking Forward

The irony isn't lost on me that I have more technical insights than ever but less time to document them properly. The rapid pace of development leaves little time for reflection, yet the experiences are rich with lessons worth sharing.

Perhaps the meta-lesson here is that the tools enabling faster development—AI-assisted coding, improved frameworks, streamlined deployment—also compress the time available for processing and sharing insights. The challenge becomes capturing knowledge in the flow of work rather than in dedicated writing sessions.