GoKawiilThoughts on slowing the fuck down
2026-03-25
The turtle's face is me looking at our industry
Table of contents
It's been about a year since coding agents appeared on the scene that could actually build you full projects. There were precursors like Aider and early Cursor, but they were more assistant than agent. The new generation is enticing, and a lot of us have spent a lot of free time building all the projects we always wanted to build but never had time to.
And I think that's fine. Spending your free time building things is super enjoyable, and most of the time you don't really have to care about code quality and maintainability. It also gives you a way to learn a new tech stack if you so want.
During the Christmas break, both Anthropic and OpenAI handed out some freebies to hook people to their addictive slot machines. For many, it was the first time they experienced the magic of agentic coding. The fold's getting bigger.
After 12 months, we are now beginning to see the effects of all that "progress". Here's my current view.
Everything is broken
While all of this is anecdotal, it sure feels like software has become a brittle mess, with 98% uptime becoming the norm instead of the exception, including for big services. And user interfaces have the weirdest fucking bugs that you'd think a QA team would catch. I give you that that's been the case for longer than agents exist. But we seem to be accelerating.
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