Author of the piece here :-). We are not building coding agents and focused on quite different stuff… I am just trying to share my personal experience as a software person!

Absolutely — but I also think there’s a strong resistance to managers saying “AI is good, really”.

The experience of long-term software engineers (e.g. antirez) who don’t have a horse in the AI race tends to line up much better with my own.

Also really like this one: https://diwank.space/field-notes-from-shipping-real-code-wit...

~~Counter~~ add to that - Armin Ronacher[0] (Flask, Sentry et al.), Charlie Marsh[1] (ruff, uv) and Jarred Sumner[2] (Bun) amongst others are tweeting extensively about their positive experiences with llm driven development.

My experience matches theirs - Claude Code is absolutely phenomenal, as is the Cursor tab completion model and the new memory feature.

[0] https://x.com/mitsuhiko

[1] https://x.com/charliermarsh

[2] https://x.com/jarredsumner

Not a counter — antirez is posting positive things too.

Charlie Marsh seems to have much better luck writing Rust with Claude than I have. Claude has been great for TypeScript changes and build scripts but lousy when it comes to stuff like Rust borrowing

Apologies I misread! Updated.

I'll add - they do seem to do better with Go and Typescript (particularly Next and React) and are somewhat good with Python (although you need a clean project structure with nothing magic in it).

This one seems really sloppy and confused; he describes three "modes of vibe coding" that involve looking at the code and therefore aren't vibe coding at all, as the definition he quoted immediately previously from Karpathy makes clear. Maybe he's writing his code by hand and letting Claude write his blog posts.

Not OP, and I don't have specific stake in any AI companies, but IMHO (as someone doing web-related things for a living (as a developer, team lead, "architect", product manager, consultant, and manager) since 1998, I think we pretty much all of us have skin in the game, whether or not we back a particular horse.

Really depends what you believe.

If you believe that agents will replace software developers like me in the near term, then you’d think I have a horse in this race.

But I don’t believe that.

My company pays for Cursor and so do I, and I’m using it with all the latest models. For my main job, writing code in a vast codebase with internal frameworks everywhere, it’s reasonably useless.

For much smaller codebases it’s much better, and it’s excellent for greenfield work.

But greenfield work isn’t where most of the money and time is spent.

There’s an assumption the tools will get much better. There are several ways they could be better (e.g. plugging into typecheckers to enable global reasoning about a codebase) but even then they’re not in replacement territory.

I listen to people like Yann LeCun and Demis Hassabis who believe further as-yet-unknown innovations are needed before we can escape a local maxima that we have with LLMs.

You need to use better coding agents and workflows.

Long-term software engineers do have an anti-horse in the AI race - a lot of us eventually could be replaced by a coding agent.

Most of us have been replaced by Microsoft Excel already though. Or by a compiler.

very true - for many tasks excel is enough, better, and faster

Long term software engineers very much have a horse in the AI race. It threatens their jobs and importance.

Took me a while to find this [1]: "We’re building the next-gen operating system for AI agents."

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1: https://sdsa.ai/

Always super helpful to post more guidelines on how to use LLMs more effectively!