Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And...
stvn.sh [1]
Absolute banger of a post, this is the time we are living in. Explain “are you afraid AI is going to take your job” to a non tech blue collar worker. Broken over promises, greed, and projects mismanaged by leadership who has no idea what the day to day work actually does and how critical it is.
I’m not quite in Sara’s position, but I feel something shielded by half of this working deep inside of a non tech part of a non tech company leading a very small rag tag team with get shit done attitude.
But I feel it, I see colleagues hit by these blasts.b I get clipped with shrapnel from some of the largest blasts. But nothing as significant as I see many others hit with
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp
[2]: /thoughts/
Posts tagged: agents
All posts with the tag "agents"
8 posts
latest post 2026-05-07
Publishing rhythm
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I hate how he called out terminal user interfaces as shit… then proved web interfaces to be superior. Damn him. I love working from my terminal, but having ai prove itself through html [1] reports including video, image, metrics, charts, and text is goated. Rethinking yourself has the bottleneck not the orchestrator feels real. Validating the work is hard, theres a shift right now and everyone is trying to figure it out. Lucas’s technique is a little bit of be lazy and tell it to prove itself to you, so as you juggle your 15 agents you have a nice report to read.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /html/
[2]: /thoughts/
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This is a really good guide, with quite a few good nuggets. I need to try deleting my AGENTS.md and rebuilding it from scratch more often. I liked how he talked about having agents prove their work and tell them up front how they will be judged. What I didn’t care for so much was the feeling that a lot of the rules go in markdown, thats not a rule, thats a suggestion. Rules should be deterministic. They should be tests and linters that ensure they are followed. Suggestions are good, but dont trust the agents to always follow them. And don’t trust that they wont change your rules, keep them honest.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Agents Are Here
🌱 This post is still growing
Late last year I started writing I'm Out On Agents [1]. Agents sucked, the
models were good, but there was still something missing between the harnesses
and the models. They could write good code, they could do some debugging and
exploring, but they were too good at fucking up the whole project to be useful.
They could crank out Green Field POC’s like nobody’s business, but they created
so much mess in brown field projects that it was easier to chat and edit
yourself.
f91a8893-b1ba-422a-9390-18de5034483c.mp4 [2]
The Beautiful Glitch - Gemini
The Inflection Point # [3]
It’s very well agreed on that the inflection point for most people happened
with Anthropic Opus 4.5 in late Nov 2025. Early adopters probably noticed
right away and shouted from the rooftops how good it was. But we’ve all heard
that developers have 6 months before ai writes all the code for years, so this
felt like the rest of the noise.
Hitting the December slowdown many of us hit cod...
Thinking about ai productivity again
Thinking about AI productivity again. It's allowing massive amounts of work to
get done, to levels that humans cannot physically type out in some cases. But
not all of this work is necessarily high value work. Right now I'm working on
one of the biggest PRs to an internal cli library. Probably the largest PR
I've ever done professionally. It touches all of the cli, refactors every
command, reaches into the business logic layers to drive deeper separation. I
reaches into the common layers to drive consistency. It ensures that every
command (50 or so) has similar flags, supports --plain, --no-color. It specs
out contracts to ensure that data goes out stdout, any extra goes out stderr.
This makes everything unix pipe friendly. There was quite a bit of research and
prep that went in, that turns out to already be distilled down into clig.dev.
The point is that this is all good work. It will make the product consistent,
repeatable, expected, and most of all boring. Most of the time, it wi...
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Such a good interview @lexfridman is such a talented interview. It’s so cool to see the other side of this. For weeks we’ve heard about the story of the name change, we’ve seen everyone shitting on the security model, buying up all the mac minis in existance, fear mongering not to install this thing. @steipete.me has such a cool story from the beginning talking about making this thing fun and exciting. Giving it a personality that is not “You are absolutely right”. The story of changing the name twice, and getting pwnd on every step the first time and nailing it the second time is incredible. Dude is having fun trying to make the thing he wants in the world exist.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Pm Not Babysitter
Stop babysitting your agents, treat them like a real team and they will reward
you.
Back in December I saw theo make a comment that code is now cheap, its the run
rate of models, He quoted a study, not sure that he fully even believed it, but
it claimed that the average developer after all meetings, training, emails,
planning and extra shit in their day averages out 10 well tested lines of code
per day. Opus 3.5 made him 10k loc (lines of code) that day.
We have all agreed for decades that lines of code is not a proxy to
productivity or quality. Often more code means more risk, more review, more
infrastructure. This has become MUCH different. Lines of code are still far
from any sort of good metric. That aside, your agents are not doing 10k lines
with you babysitting them, and in fact its very likely that the product quality
is MUCH worse as you babysit them.
You need a tool for planning and tracking, otherwise you are playing babysitter
rather than Product Manager (PM).
Agent Management Is Exhausting
The state of development in early 2026 is all wrapped around learning how to
manage many agents running in parallel. Everyone’s trying to figure out the
workflow.
The Plan Is Everything # [1]
The secret I’ve discovered is a good, well-defined plan. This could be a
markdown file or a GitHub issue. Agents are actually great at writing these for
you. They’ll include reproduction steps, outline changes needed, and structure
the work.
This is your opportunity to step in. Read the plan. Look for hallucinations.
Spot where it’s going off track. Edit the plan before the agent starts coding.
I had one today where it laid out reproduction steps beautifully, but I could
add context about network requests that completely changed the approach. This
editing phase is what most people are missing right now. Skip it and you’ll
watch your agent solve the wrong problem with impressive efficiency.
The Pace Problem # [2]
Here’s what nobody warned me about: managing these things is exhausting.
Dep...
Context Is King
A new approach to agentic workflows.
This is probably news to no one else, I’m sure I’m behind on this one. You
can’t one sentence prompt and expect to get what you want.
Agents.md # [1]
Writing Complete Prompts # [2]
References:
[1]: #agentsmd
[2]: #writing-complete-prompts
I'm In On Agents
It’s the start of 2026 and agents are getting a lot better than they were. I’m
using opencode at home, free mode with Zen and big pickle. At work I have
access to a wider variety of models including what seems to be the gold
standard 3 from anthropic opus, sonnet, haiku.
Note
I’ve sat on this post for over a month, refactored it a few times, things
feel like they are moving so fast that its hard to keep my feelings
straight.
Things are changing # [1]
Around Aug 2025 I wrote I'm Out On Agents [2]. I saw others in the space having
such great success I gave it a solid shot, but found it to egregious edit more
than I asked, make massive unneeded changes, and make more small bugs hidden in
the details than was worth it.
This was just after the tipping point where not just hype bros were making the
switch, but people I work with, people I trust and have made really good
Software in their career. People like the creator of Flask Armin Ronacher.
People who are really good at writing co...
I'm Out On Agents
Its the year 2025 and we are only a few years into having 6 months to live
before ai takes our jobs, and the big push right now is agents, managing
agents. I will fully concede to I’m not doing it right, or a future state gets
better than where we are right now, but right now they kinda suck.
Transparency
I’m sitting offline right now as I write this, These are my feels, no
research, no links, no ai, just vibes.
Chat # [1]
Chat is what really kicked off ai uses and goes back as old as computers, but
it always sucked. Then chatgpt rocked the world with the biggest launch day in
history and showed us that it could actually be pretty good. Unethically
trained on everything they could get their hands on, burning cities worth of
electricity to train, and keep training to stay ahead of the competition. It
does a damn good job. There are tells, and if you see enough of it there is a
lot that turns to slop, but if you had never seen it before, there is no way
you would assume that it wa...