Coding agents have crossed a chasm (News)

0:28What up nerds? that our lives intersected if only for a brief while. Michael died at 42 years young, my exact age today. Count your blessings, y 'all. We aren't guaranteed tomorrow. You should read his full obituary. Link in the newsletter. Okay, let's get into the news. Coding agents have crossed a chasm. My recent experience aligns with David Singleton's, who says, quote, 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-y way, but in a very concrete, this is changing how I ship software way.

1:18End quote. I explained to Adam on Friends episode 98 that Claude Code feels like it's delivering on the promises that the AI hypesters have been making ever since ChatGPT broke the internet back in November of 22. I'm letting it code up many scripts and tools that didn't cross my personal ROI threshold previously, and David says the same. Quote, for personal tools, I've completely shifted my approach. I don't even look at the code anymore. I describe what I want to cloud 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.

1:54The software engineering squeeze. Software engineers have had it easy for many years, but the times certainly are a-changing. Anton Zaydis is optimistic. Quote, all those companies started by vibe coders all around you, many will succeed and will need great engineers to scale up. Some engineers understand this and use the chance to scale up. To succeed, you'll probably need all the skills of an engineer, some of a PM, and even a bit of design taste. It's not just about shipping code anymore. But if you work as a code monkey, getting detailed tickets and just shipping them, you've done this to yourself.

2:30You won't be needed pretty soon, end quote. Say it with me, for the umpteenth time, we have to move up the value chain. Just keep moving on up to avoid the squeeze. What would a Kubernetes 2.0 look like? Matt Duggan has been working with Kubernetes for 10 plus years and has a lot of good things to say about it, but the journey hasn't been without problems. Quote, some common trends have emerged where mistakes or misconfiguration arise from where Kubernetes is not opinionated enough. Even 10 years on, we're still seeing a lot of churn inside of ecosystem and people stepping on well-documented landmines.

3:07End quote. So knowing what he knows now, Matt asks and answers the question, what could we do differently to make this great tool even more applicable to more people and problems. Here's the top level of his thoughts. One, ditch YAML for HCL. Two, allow Etsy de-swap out. Three, a native package manager. And four, IPv6 by default. Click through for the skinny on each improvement. I'll clip one last thought from Matt because it's a crucial point even if you aren't a Kubernetes person. Defaults are the most powerful force in technology. Coding agents are already commoditized. Sean Godecki does a nice job elucidating another thought I've had while talking to various devs about coding agents and seeing so many orgs shipping their own lately.

3:54These things have no moat. Quote, it turns out that put the model in a loop with a read file and write file tool is good enough to do basically anything you want. I don't know for sure that the closed source options operate like this, but it's an educated guess. In other words, the agent hackers in 2023 were correct. And the only reason they couldn't build CloudCode then was that they were too early to get to use the really good models. End quote. Sean says it's a tough market right now to sell a better AI coding agent in because open source solutions like OpenAI's Codex are already very good.

4:26But that's not even the point. The reason OpenAI wants you using Codex and Anthropic wants you using CloudCode and Google wants you using Gemini's CLI and Sourcegraph once you're using AMP is not to sell you a better coding agent, it's to sell you their tokens instead of you buying somebody else's tokens. The challenge with that strategy is that it has a very small moat. Not no moat, mind you, but not much of one either. Write to escape your default setting. Writing is hard, painful even. In the past, I've likened publishing an essay to birthing a child. They're both laborious journeys mired in contractions, heavy breathing, and occasional screams.

5:04My wife, who birthed six healthy children on our behalf, finds that analogy lacking. She deserves to. I'd come up with a better one, but writing is hard. I guess my point is, sometimes we need motivation to do hard things. If you need some reasons to write, this one's for you. Quote, At its best, writing can expose the ugly, uncomfortable, or unrealistic parts of your thoughts. It can pluck out parasitic ideas burrowed so deeply that they imperceptibly steer your feelings and beliefs. Sometimes this uprooting will reveal that the lustrous potential of a new idea is a mirage, or that your understanding of someone's motive was incomplete.

5:44Maybe your own projected BS reflected back to you. That is the news for now, but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as... Open source has turned into two worlds. Get quick statistics. And a clawed code usage monitor. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. All right, have a great week. Like, subscribe, and five-star review us if you like the show. And I'll talk to you again real soon.