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# The Year We Didn’t Write Code
- URL: https://huizhou92.com/the-year-we-didnt-write-code/
- Published: 2025-12-19T07:30:20.000Z
- Updated: 2025-12-19T07:30:20.000Z
- Description: The Year We Didn’t Write Code. A short memoir from the Age of Prompt Gods That evening, I was sitting in a rocking chair at a retirement home. Beside me, a。
- Author: huizhou92
- Tags: #Migrated-1788833207488, #Import 2026-09-08 02:07

*A short memoir from the Age of Prompt Gods*

That evening, I was sitting in a rocking chair at a retirement home.

Beside me, an AI caregiver was installing my **42nd personality patch**.

My grandson suddenly looked up from his holographic tablet, visibly disturbed.

> “Grandpa,” he asked, “were programmers in 2025… superstitious?”

I paused.

> “What makes you say that?”

He turned the projection toward me. On the screen was a directory I instantly recognized — one of *my* old projects.

```css
. 
├── src/ 
├── .claude 
├── CLAUDE.md 
├── .cursorrules 
├── .github/ 
│   └── copilot-instructions.md 
├── AGENTS.md 
├── openspec.yaml 
├── prompts/ 
│   ├── system.txt 
│   └── personality.md 
└── README.md
```

He frowned.

> “The core logic is three lines,” he said.  
> “But the instructions for AI are longer than *Sapiens*.”

I sighed.

> “Those weren’t instructions,” I told him. “They were prayers.”

### The Polytheistic IDE Era

“You see,” I began, “we lived through the **Great Melee of Language Model Gods**.”

- Cursor was one god.
- Claude was another.
- Copilot belonged to some Nordic pantheon.
- Open-source agents were folk deities — unstable, powerful, and poorly documented.

And all of them claimed to follow *standards*.

If you wrote an `AGENTS.MD`, Cursor would say:

> *“I don’t accept this format.”*

You renamed it to `.cursorrules`, and Claude replied:

> *“Sorry, I’m blind in IDE mode.”*

You unified everything into `openspec.yaml`, and all AIs agreed:

> *“This looks great.* 
> *We don’t support it.”*

### How to Talk to AI (Circa 2025)

My grandson interrupted.

> “Couldn’t you just write one file?”

I laughed.

> “You don’t understand,” I said. “Each AI demanded to be **respected individually**.”

To Cursor, you had to say:

> *“You are a world-class software engineer.”*

To Claude:

> *“You are cautious, humble, and principled.”*

To Copilot:

> *“Give me code. No explanations.”*

To open-source agents, you first had to explain:

- what year it was
- who you were
- who *they* were
- why either of you existed

And every one of these messages had to live in a **different file**, with a **different name**, in a **different directory**.

Otherwise, the AI would get… upset.

Not visibly.  
Just enough to:

- Confidently write incorrect code
- Answer B when you asked A
- Hallucinate with moral authority

### Debugging the Gods

“How did you debug them?” my grandson asked.

I stayed quiet for a long time.

“With rituals,” I finally said.

Delete `.claude`, and Cursor suddenly became brilliant.  
Add “think step by step,” and Copilot froze.  
Change nothing. Restart the IDE. Everything worked.

We called it:

**Prompt cache misalignment**

Which really meant:

*We had no idea why.*

### A Classic Commit from the Era

I pulled up an old repository.

```makefile
feat: adjust agent prompts
```

0 lines of business logic changed  
+300 lines of prompts  
\-200 lines of promptsFixed one bug  
Introduced two new ones

My grandson stared at it.

“So… what did you do all day?”

I looked toward the ruins of an abandoned data center.

“We weren’t writing code,” I said.

“We were negotiating with different vendors’ AIs  
about how they should interpret the same code.”

### The Final Standardization

“What happened later?” he asked.

“Eventually,” I said, “the industry unified.”

His eyes lit up.

“Really?”

“Yes,” I nodded.  
“Everyone standardized on… their own standard.”

He fell silent.

“It was like the browser wars,” I added,  
“except this time we never rendered a page.

We just wrote instructions *for the browser*.”

### Epilogue (from the README)

I read him the last line of the README:

> If you open this project on the same day, in the same mood,  
> using the same IDE, the same AI, and the same version,  
> it should work.

He nodded slowly.

> “Now I understand,”   
> he said  
> “why `.claude` files were eventually banned by law.”

I smiled.

A genuine smile.  
Because in that moment, I knew:  
Humanity had finally graduated from **prompt engineering**.

And moved on to something else. We didn’t understand yet.