The Tab Has Turned: Even the Skeptics Are Getting Hooked on AI Coding Tools

We’ve crossed the threshold. The moment when even the high priests of performance, the wizards of the stack, the cursor skeptics—yes, even those guys—are now cracking their knuckles and auto-completing their way into the future.

Over the past few months, a perceptible vibe shift has rippled through the dev world. Theo from T3.gg called it out:

“Almost all of the best devs I know are suddenly embracing AI dev tools.”

This isn’t just another hype wave. This is acceleration. The kind of shift you feel in your gut when you switch from a tricycle to a rocket sled.

Even Charlie Marsh, the brains behind Ruff (and no stranger to high-performance tooling), admitted:

“It’s extremely concerning how quickly I’ve become dependent on Cursor-like tab completion. I need the editor to pick up on my cues and let me tab instantly to do my bidding.”

Let’s pause on that: “do my bidding”. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the new control surface of programming. Instead of painstakingly carving out logic with your bare hands, you’re now orchestrating your will through an AI-enhanced IDE that feels like a telepathic extension of your intentions.

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Cursor, Copilot, and the No-Going-Back Threshold

Theo followed up with this banger:

“Seeing wizards like him embrace Cursor is huge. I think we have crossed the ‘no going back now’ threshold.”

Cursor has become a talisman for this transformation. It’s not just faster than Copilot—it’s more in tune. It picks up on the ambient frequency of your coding style. It doesn’t just autocomplete—it co-conspires.

For a deeper dive into what makes this shift feel so irreversible, check out Cursor: A new AI IDE. It’s a tight walkthrough that showcases how it’s not about sprinkling in some AI here and there—it’s a full-stack rethink of the development experience.

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Even the Purists Are Caving

If you need further proof that the tide has fully turned, watch this: “Why I switched to AI-assisted development.” It’s from a dev who was not easily impressed. The kind of person who probably reads compiler release notes for fun and scoffs at boilerplate.

What changed? Speed. Context. Flow. The moment you realize your mental stack isn’t clogged with syntax trivia and repetitive plumbing, you start asking a different kind of question: “What can’t I build now?”

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The Acceleration is Cultural, Not Just Technical

What’s happening here isn’t just about better autocomplete. It’s about a new relationship to agency. AI dev tools are making programming feel less like assembling IKEA furniture and more like casting spells. You describe intent; the system fills in the gap.

And this isn’t just happening in a vacuum. The best devs are no longer gatekeeping. They’re leading the charge. The line between novice and expert is blurring. Tools like Cursor aren’t dumbing things down—they’re lifting the floor and the ceiling at the same time.

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This Is the Part Where We Let Go

A lot of us (myself included) came up in the era where mastery meant memorization. You knew your editor, your stack, your compiler flags, your linter configs. Now? That knowledge is still useful—but the new game is orchestration. It’s conversation. It’s knowing how to direct your AI pair like a symphony conductor.

If you’ve been resisting AI tools out of some ideological purity or performance paranoia—time to let go. The skeptics are already onboarding. The cursor is moving with or without you.

And as Theo said:

“If Charlie Marsh and I disagree on something, I’m probably the one who is wrong.”

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Let’s just admit it.
We’re all tabbing into the future now.