Rui CarmoA few things I jotted down during this week’s bout of coding with AI agents–i.e., while building out my agentbox and webterm setups and other things.
Agents love specs. My go-ooxml project went from nothing to 60% spec compliance in days because I fed the agents the actual ECMA-376 spec documents and told them to implement against those. No hallucination about what XML elements should be called, no invented APIs—just spec-compliant code.
Mobile is an afterthought until it isn’t. Half the webterm fixes this week were iOS/iPad edge cases. If you’re building tools you’ll use on multiple devices, test on all of them early, because agents can only help you with things that they can test for autonomously.
The unglamorous work matters. I did a lot of CI/CD cleanup jobs, release automation, Docker pipelines, and invested quite a few hours in creating solid SKILL.md scaffolding–none of this is exciting, but it’s what separates a tool you can rely on from a tool that occasionally bites you, and right now, for me, at least, it’s what makes AI agents genuinely useful.
There’s going to be more software. With such a low barrier to entry into new languages, tools or frameworks, any decent programmer is soon going to realize that their skills are transferable to the point where they can take on work in any technology.
There’s going to be more shitty software because, well, there are a lot of overconfident people out there, for starters, and the law of averages is inevitably going to kick in at some point. I am acutely aware that I am treading a fine line between “productive developer leveraging AI” and “architecture astronaut”, but my focus is always on shipping self-contained, small tools that solve real problems (for me, at least), so I hope I can avoid that pitfall.
The number of truly gifted developers is going to stay roughly the same, because programming, like any form of engineering, is a mindset much more than it is a skill.
Some of these are debatable, of course, but they are my current take on things. Let’s see how they hold up over time.