The rise of agentic AI tools is opening up an opportunity to bring us back to that original world of wonder where you could just build what you wanted, even without a CS degree.
Code
If adopting coding agents demonstrably reduces the quality of the code and features you are producing, you should address that problem directly: figure out which aspects of your process are hurting the quality of your output and fix them.
Shipping worse code with agents is a choice. We can choose to ship code that is better instead.
Rafe Colburn, riffing on a post from Robin Sloan:
Robin Sloan describes himself as the programming equivalent of a home cook. I’ve been working in professional kitchens for a really long time, but lately I’ve rediscovered the joy of home cooking myself.
Ditto.
We’ve been talking a lot at Viget about how to customize CLAUDE.md so I’m doing some reading this afternoon:
- Learning the basics of CLAUDE.md
- Learning the basis of writing skills
- Checking out examples of skills from folks like jibbajabba, jackyliang, and obra
Simon Willison is sharing patterns (and anti-patterns) for agentic software engineering