Last year I was in Okinawa, at a hotel bar, furiously coding the core of fate.technology that an LLM concluded couldn’t be done the way I wanted. LLMs just couldn’t get a lot of the core algorithms right at the time.
The next day, I did the same at a matcha café in Ishigaki City and again at night at the hotel bar until closing time. I thought that with the core figured out, I could hand it back to the LLM. Unfortunately it kept writing too much code that didn’t work.
The flight back was supposed to be three hours long - but it took five. Normally I get headaches on flights, can’t concentrate, and the kids need attention. However, this flight was in the evening, kids fell asleep and I was feeling great. I spent two hours wired-in, coding without Internet or LLMs and I got the initial version of fate working end to end. It felt amazing, and I put the laptop away. A thunderstorm over Tokyo kept delaying the landing and we had severe turbulence which led me to throw up several times. We were diverted to Nagoya - I was in a bad state but fate was working!
I spent the next month finishing together with an LLM. I’ve since used fate in every web/UI project I’ve worked on. This happened less than a year ago, and it sounds unreal (Imagine how unreal this story would have sounded just three years ago!). I was about to give up on LLMs, thinking they couldn’t do what I wanted them to do. But now in 2026, the magic computer writes all my code.
It feels strange to say goodbye to something I used to do for so long, but I also can no longer imagine writing code when something else can do it faster and better than me. fate will always be the last framework I built.