Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of Hashicorp and, more recently, Ghostty in a post on his relationship with AI coding:

Instead of giving up, I forced myself to reproduce all my manual commits with agentic ones. I literally did the work twice. I'd do the work manually, and then I'd fight an agent to produce identical results in terms of quality and function (without it being able to see my manual solution, of course).

This was excruciating, because it got in the way of simply getting things done. But I've been around the block with non-AI tools enough to know that friction is natural, and I can't come to a firm, defensible conclusion without exhausting my efforts.

But, expertise formed. I quickly discovered for myself from first principles what others were already saying, but discovering it myself resulted in a stronger fundamental understanding.

1. Break down sessions into separate clear, actionable tasks. Don't try to "draw the owl" in one mega session.
2. For vague requests, split the work into separate planning vs. execution sessions.
3. If you give an agent a way to verify its work, it more often than not fixes its own mistakes and prevents regressions.

More generally, I also found the edges of what agents -- at the time -- were good at, what they weren't good at, and for the tasks they were good at how to achieve the results I wanted.

I recorded an interview on the freeCodeCamp podcast a few days ago saying the same thing. Namely, that this reminds me of every other time programmers have needed to learn a new way to do something they already know how to do some other way. When I was teaching teams test-driven development, I always had to encourage them to force themselves to test-drive 100% of their code without exceptions so they're forced to actually learn the difference between, "this is hard because it's a bad tool for the job," and, "this is hard because I've not mastered this tool yet."

Over-application of a tool is an important part of learning it. And it applies just about every time we're forced to change our ways, whether switching from Windows to Linux, a graphical IDE to terminal Vim, or from Google Drive to a real filesystem.

Either you're the type who can stomach the discomfort of slowing down to adopt change, or you're not. And many (most?) programmers are not. They're the ones who should be worried right now.

v50 - SpaceXXX

Breaking Change Breaking Change

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Video of this episode is up on YouTube:

Glad to see Jerod properly follow up on this one:

In September of last year, I covered a post by Mike Judge arguing that AI coding claims don't add up, in which he asked this question:

If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.

I was capital-T Triggered by this, having separately fired off my own retort to Judge's post at the time, and even going so far as creating a Certified Shovelware README badge:

And that badge has gotten a lot of action in the intervening 2 months. Shit, last night I released two—count'em, two—Homebrew formulae last night. I wouldn't have bothered creating either were it not for the rapacious tenacity of coding agents. (Please ignore the fact that both projects exist in order to wrangle said coding agents).

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about that Shovelware post ever since, and again recently with all the mainstream press coverage of ClawdBot/Moltbot/OpenClaw this week—especially as I see long-term skeptics of AI's utility like Nilay Patel finally declaring this as the moment where he sees the value in agents. (My dude, I was automating my Mac with claude-discord-bridge and AppleScript from my doctor's office in late July!)

But I was too lazy to take those thoughts and do anything with them. Unlike me, Jerod did the work of rendering the chart that properly puts the original, "where's the shovelware," complaint to rest. Rather than hotlink his image, I encourage you to click through to see for yourself:

This, to me, looks like the canary in the coal mine; the bellwether leading the flock; the first swallow of summer; the… you get the idea.

Hard agree. I said then and continue to agree with myself now that (1) it makes no sense to start the clock in November 2022, because no AI coding products prior to terminal-based coding agents ever mattered, and (2) people woefully underestimate the degree to which programmers are actually late adopters. (Raise your hand if you're still refusing to install macOS Tahoe, for fuck's sake.)

Even today, I'd be shocked if over 5% of professional programmers worldwide have attempted to adopt a terminal-based coding agent in anger. The amount of technically-useful, mostly-broken software we're going to be inundated with a year from now will be truly mind-bending.