State of Agentic Coding #10 with Armin and Ben ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 00:00 Cold Open and Episode Kickoff03:52 AI Watermarking11:32 Slop and LLM Writing17:19 Cursor and OpenAI28:00 Model Loyalty30:38 Open-Weight Models45:05 Clo... Date: September 10, 2026 Image: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9UAxrdcDjjU/maxresdefault.jpg The state of agentic coding is one of my favorite new podcasts of late. The name sounds just like the same slop as everything else, but Ben and Armin are top tier hosts that actually do this stuff for work and on the side. slowing down and speeding up ──────────────────────────── Which brings me to the first intersting topic they talked about. Both talked about going slow at work. Ben still reads everything and deeply understands the insode of what he is working on. Home is a different story. At home both are cranking on new side projects, vibing them out quick and fast. The projects work for them and thats all they need. They dont need to support hundreds of users. All making it much easier to just let thr clanker kick new things out fast. open weight ─────────── An interesting side topic on open weight models. Armin opened with them being too expensive. The big labs have such good subsidies right now that it’s hard to justify not using them. He did have an interesting use case though. He has a side project using cheap Chinese carplay devices. When trying to get openai to work on them it tends to refuse to work for security reasons, but if he starts thr session with kimi, openai has no problems continuing. This is next level of whispering just the right tokens to thr model to get it to magically do things for you that it otherwise wouldn’t. He also commented this tends to work with distillation refusals too. He said he will get refusals for false distalation atrempts when working on pi. new tools?? ─────────── Armin admits that he tries all of the new ai tools as the come out, maybe not all, but a lot. He says he has adopted a whopping zero of them and his ai tools has not changed in the last year. They just dont seem to add anything for him. Agents with a good harness and some skills is about all he needs.