Joy & Curiosity #66

Joy & Curiosity #66 Interesting & joyful things from the previous week The number one thing that I keep thinking about these days is how to reconcile the following in my head: Friends of mine - very experienced and very good programmers - are saying loudly and publicly and in private too that agents are useless. It’s slop, they say. It’s all just averages. No brilliance, no creativity, and half of it doesn’t work. It can’t do what I do. They point out where it failed to make an edit. Where it gave a function a weird name. Where it didn’t run the tests. Then there’s my experience with using them. I see Amp knock out stuff that would’ve taken me days and, as a junior engineer, possibly weeks, if I had done it myself. I saw Amp built a tiny and brilliant renderer for box-drawing characters in my terminal emulator. It does performance optimizations, it builds very good looking animations in our TUI framework. It built this and this and this with no hands on the wheel. I saw it build a one-off migration tool for our production database, carefully balancing tradeoffs here to build something that’s reliable and inspectable, but also one-off, with as little code as I would’ve written. It helped me deploy and run it and then refine it. When it can’t find jq on a machine, it uses Python for one-liners, doesn’t matter. Yesterday I had it help me configure Home Assistant on my Raspberry Pi and I just sat there and talked to it like a true assistant. It’s very good. Very, very, very good. So good that I’m starting to think the whole “we will all just delegate work to agents” might not be as unrealistic as it sounds like. But then someone writes somewhere that these agents “can barely write code” and I can’t help but silently wonder: what the hell are you talking about man? My teammate Lewis wrote about how he does context management in Amp and how 200k of tokens is plenty if you use handoff, references, and forks. And then he also shipped the thread map , which, when he first showed it off in Tallinn a week ago, caused a whole scene in the room, with people saying “whoa” and “holy shit” out loud. Not kidding. People literally gathered around Lewis saying ooh and aah while showed off what he had built. That, in turn, made me get up and walk over and also say “holy shit, dude”. Ryan and I talked to Mckay Wrigley about Opus 4.5 and how we see the future of software development. It’s all happening, isn’t it. Obie Fernandez ( the Obie Fernandez in case you also used Rails between 2010 and 2015) on “ what happens when the coding becomes the least interesting part of the work ”. This is some of the realest, truest, most experienced writing on the topic of agents taking over. I agree with nearly everything he...

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