David Singleton, writing in his blog:

Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They’ve gone from a “hey this is pretty neat” curiosity to something I genuinely can’t imagine working without. Not in a hand-wavy, hype-cycle way, but in a very concrete “this is changing how I ship software” way.

I have to agree. My recent tinkering projects with Cursor using Claude 4 Sonnet (and set to Cursor’s MAX mode) have been much smoother and much more autonomous.

And Singleton has found that Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are good for different things:

For personal tools, I’ve completely shifted my approach. I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different initial prompt. The iteration cycle is so fast that it’s often quicker to start over than trying to debug or modify the generated code myself. This has unlocked a level of creative freedom where I can build small utilities and experiments without the usual friction of implementation details.

And the larger point Singleton makes is that if you direct the right context to the reasoning model, it can help you solve your problem more effectively:

This points to something bigger: there’s an emerging art to getting the right state into the context window. It’s sometimes not enough to just dump code at these models and ask “what’s wrong?” (though that works surprisingly often). When stuck, you need to help them build the same mental framework you’d give to a human colleague. The sequence diagram was essentially me teaching Claude how to think about our OAuth flow. In another recent session, I was trying to fix a frontend problem (some content wouldn’t scroll) and couldn’t figure out where I was missing the correct CSS incantation. Cursor’s Agent mode couldn’t spot it either. I used Chrome dev tools to copy the entire rendered HTML DOM out of the browser, put that in the chat with Claude, and it immediately pinpointed exactly where I was missing an overflow: scroll.

For my designer audience out there—likely 99% of you—I think this post is informative as to how to work with reasoning models like Claude 4 or o4. This can totally apply to prompt-to-code tools like Lovable and v0. And these ideas can likely apply to Figma Make and Subframe.