The Brute Squad
Welcome back! Come one, come all, friends, foes, fart connoisseurs, all are welcome here at Camel Central. It has been an action-packed three months since Revenge of the Junior Developer (RotJD), which is essential reading for this post, so shoo, off you go. You might also want to watch The Princess Bride, up to you. As you wish!
What has changed since March? Much and little, more or less. For starters, models got better. Claude 3.7, every programmer's favorite, is now nearly four months old, one foot already in the grave, sounding like a talking parrot compared to the newer models. Recent releases from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are chewing through problems that were unsolvable by their predecessors. At least on my box. We're still on those curves, right on schedule.
We've also got a crop of exciting autonomous-agent tools, the so-called camels that are replacing all that walking you're doing with Cursor right now. For instance, in response to the game-changing Claude Code, OpenAI launched their own coding agent, which they named Codex, in a clever nod to how nobody can understand any of their model names or when they came out or how they relate to each other or which one is better for any given task. Codex is ideal for anyone who understands that stuff, e.g. presumably certain OpenAI employees, possibly some of the models themselves.
Rounding out the trio, Sourcegraph launched Amp, which is a team-oriented enterprise coding agent, with leaderboards, public workstreams, and friendly competition. People are finding Amp refreshing and our users are effusive about it; even Swyx gave it a nod recently (yo Swyx!)
So now you have choices. Claude Code, Codex, and Amp: three serious commercial autonomous coding agent contenders. And there are also some great OSS agents improving fast, like Cline and RooCode, for which I have high hopes.
What else is new since March? I am relieved to report that I have at long last finished co-authoring a book on vibe coding, along with my buddy, famed writer/researcher Gene Kim. It was a months-long slog for us to make it an hours-long read. It's our instruction manual for vibe coding, both with chat and with autonomous agents. Vibe coding professionally is a complex craft, and a topic for another day. But I'll drop a link at the end, and I'll be posting more about it soon.
One other small bit of news, prompted in part by RotJD, is that in April I got to meet Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, for a private half hour 1:1 chat at their HQ. Unfortunately on the way over, my brain received a remote firmware downgrade, leaving me with the intelligence and personality of a sea cucumber for approximately thirty-five minutes. But it was a delightful discussion, uh, for me, and I will share some of the highlights toward the end of the post.
And with that, on with the show! Our production today features more of everything you loved from RotJD. In this post you'll be treated to crazy news and crazier stories that touch on three themes: 1) Dev work is changing, 2) Knowledge work is changing, and 3) Society is changing. We'll have more predictions, more facts, and more flatulence; I leave it to you to decide what's what.
If you don't like long form reading, then, TL;DR: Either learn to use coding agents, or start learning a trade. I hear electricians drive the nicest cars on the construction sites. And plumbers are the new millionaire class. You've got options.
... continue reading