Posts tagged: agents

💭 A love letter to Pi | Lucas Meijer

2026-04-15T16:12:33Z

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 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. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How Claude Code’s Creator Starts EVERY Project - YouTube

2026-04-15T16:07:26Z

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. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Agents Are Here

2026-04-10T16:11:37Z

Late last year I started writing I'm Out On Agents. 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 a 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.

The vibe coding era—before the breakthrough—meant accepting code you didn’t read. Theo's framework mattered then: don’t land in “don’t know, don’t care, mission critical.” Most of us were stuck there. Developers naturally got great tools. Artists got prompt engineering. The difference in how we approached AI shaped everything that came next.

f91a8893-b1ba-422a-9390-18de5034483c.mp4

The Beautiful Glitch - Gemini

The Inflection Point #

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 code freezes at work. We completely disconnect from work for the last Week and come back in January. During this time, its very common for us to try out new tools, new techniques work on side projects, create POC for that thing we never have time for. While it looks like less features coming into the apps we support this is an important time for us to explore and reflect.

December wasn’t just about the models getting better. The tooling exploded. I started noticing variants popping up—fast, slow, thinking modes. Anthropic was super generous with a free tier giving out huge levels of free tokens at the time. So many of us laughed and threw it at our side projects expecting the normal garbage output, but maybe some good ideas to come from it. But that’s not what was happening anymore, somehow these agents do some real work, follow plans and stick to scope really well. And if you lay out a big enough plan they tended to keep cooking and completing features.

This was the shift I started documenting in I'm In-ish On Agents. “Context is king, good plans are paramount, syntax barely matter.”

January 2026 #

flu season

For me and many others around the country we were hit with a rough flu season, kicking in and draining us mentally for a good month or so. I wanted to work, I was getting excited about some projects and wanted to get them going, but I was constantly wiped and had no capacity. I had no ability to think on complex tasks, I was coughing all the time, just trying to survive, but yet wanted to do something. I started doing some small clean up, some work on side projects.

January was when I wrote Stop Using Boomer Ai. The chat-copy-paste era ended for me. If you were still doing that, you were doing it wrong.

Somewhere in the fever haze, I started figuring out the harness. Not just prompting—planning. My First Agentic Workflow documents the /init, AGENTS.md, the whole ritual: issue → plan → execute → review.

At this point I was still afraid of really letting agents cut loose on something meaningful, something that users depend on. But the framework was taking shape. “There is no free lunch. Software engineering is still very much needed, but the work is switching.”

February 2026 #

what just happened?

It got fast. Too fast.

Agent Management Is Exhausting

Claude could implement features faster than I could research and raise issues. It’s like trying to speedrun a Minecraft seed when you just figured out how to craft a pickaxe. “Depending on the day, agents move so damn fast. I can barely research, find, and raise issues as fast as Claude can implement features and fixes.”

The exhaustion was real—managing these things stretches a different part of your brain than you’re used to using. “I had a session yesterday where the context got poisoned with a wrong assumption. The agent spent 20 minutes building on that false premise before I caught it. That’s 20 minutes of perfectly executed code solving the wrong problem entirely.”

This is when I realized babysitting was the wrong frame. Theo’s quote haunted me: developers average 10 well-tested lines of code per day, Opus 3.5 made him 10k LOC in a day. “Stop babysitting your agents, treat them like a real team and they will reward you. You need a tool for planning and tracking, otherwise you are playing babysitter rather than Product Manager.”

yes or –dangerously-accept #

Somewhere between February’s chaos and March’s clarity, the workflow solidified. The yes-or-die moment. The –dangerously-accept flag.

From How To Run 5 Agents In Parallel Feb 2026 Edition: “Planning is the core of what it takes to keep agents running… Agents need something to do, telling them to turn the circle green, then blue, then to a rectangle, is not it.” With a good plan, well-scoped and documented, they’ll keep working. The question becomes: are you reviewing every line, or are you managing plans?

This is when you decide. This is when the frame shifts from “will it break” to “is it solving the right problem.”

March 2026 #

the productivity paradox

I built one of the biggest PRs I’ve ever done professionally. Fifty commands refactored, stdout/stderr contracts established, Unix-pipe friendly—all patterns from clig.dev, implemented consistently.

The agents cranked out more code than I could have typed in months. “There’s a lot that’s getting done that there’s no way I could do alone, it would take a full team with heavy coordination.”

But here’s the thing: [[thinking-about-ai-productivity-again|it’s low value work]]. “This is all good work. It will make the product consistent, repeatable, expected, and most of all boring. But its low value work. We wouldn’t have likely put humans on this work wholesale and fixed critical paths as they came up.”

Am I more productive? “I’m definitely doing more, there are more lines of code… but its hard to sus out the real productivity from the noise.”

Around this time, I realized: I don't want someone else running my agents. “I don’t want to review the mass of changes clobbered across the codebase… If someone is going to be stirring the slop in my product, I want it to be me.”

April 2026 #

here now

The agents are here. They’re not what we thought they’d be in 2024, not what I thought they’d be in August 2025.

They’re exhausting. They’re fast. They require a different kind of management. [[the-ai-wars-are-so-much-worse-than-the-framework-wars|The pace is worse than the framework wars ever were.]]

But they’re here. And the work keeps changing. Expectations are changing, the way work is completed is changing, and we are all here trying to figure out what this looks like moving forward.

Closing the editor #

The editor is closed more often now. I still peek in, still review when it matters, still own my words on this site. But the work happens differently.

If you want to see how this evolved, start with I'm In-ish On Agents, check out My First Agentic Workflow for the mechanics, or read Agent Management Is Exhausting when you’re tired.

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Closing the Editor - Gemini

Thinking about ai productivity again

2026-03-16T21:01:44Z

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 will just work. Since we did it ahead of a lot of other agentic work on the product its establishing good patterns for the product moving forward. But its low value work. We wouldn’t have likely put humans on this work wholesale and fixed critical paths as they came up. Its not cutting cost, selling more product, or driving critical business decisions. Yes it’s worth it now, but it would not have bee in the past.

💭 OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter S...

2026-02-16T10:19:08Z

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 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. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Pm Not Babysitter

2026-02-06T14:04:25Z

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

2026-01-26T14:38:35Z

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 #

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 #

Here’s what nobody warned me about: managing these things is exhausting.

Depending on the day, agents move so damn fast. I can barely research, find, and raise issues as fast as Claude can implement features and fixes. It’s like trying to speedrun a Minecraft seed when you just figured out how to craft a pickaxe.

A Different Kind of Work #

This stretches a different part of my brain than I’m used to using. I’m learning new skills around:

Issue tracking and management at high velocity
Knowing which models handle which tasks best
Spotting when a session is about to go sideways from context bloat or bad compaction

I had a session yesterday where the context got poisoned with a wrong assumption. The agent spent 20 minutes building on that false premise before I caught it. That’s 20 minutes of perfectly executed code solving the wrong problem entirely.

Worth It, But Hard #

I’m not going to hype-bro you and say this is easy or that you’re wrong to be skeptical. If you have the opportunity to work with agents, it’s worth learning proper techniques.

It’s not easy. It requires actual management skills, not just prompting skills. And yeah, I’m tired.