AI SWE Newsletter
I’ve been using coding agents to write 100% of my code since Claude Code came out. The discourse lately about a big shift in agent ability initially surprised me. I agree the agents are great. Though I have not seen a huge difference between Opus 4.5 and 4.6 as well as Codex-5.2 and 5.3. The new models are incredible. The models just before were quite incredible too. I will admit, 4.6 and 5.3 seem…
I love programming with agents. I was an early adopter of Claude Code and I feel like it unleashed a burst of creativity for me. At the same time, I’ve been puzzled to find that as I use agents more, I get this distinct sense that they’re slow. I’ve spent the past 6 months trying to root cause this feeling by building. At first I built my own cloud agents. My reasoning went: if agents are slow,…
I recently shut down my startup, Engines. Coming off that experience, I felt a huge burst of creative energy to build and explore. I had some inklings that AI coding interfaces didn’t align with my sensibilities (mainly achieving flow while coding with agents) and I want to build my own background agent interface to see how it would work. Here’s my experience building a background agent on top of…
Over the course of building Engines, I came to realize that a startup is momentum. You can build momentum in various ways: Outreach to customers Building new products and features Blogging about what you're building Raising funding To win, you have to do all these things. Not necessarily at the same time. But relentlessly over time. You have to tap into a deep well of demand for something people…
If you try to read everything there is to know about a subject, you’ll never get started learning. Starting a company is an act of doing. When I first decided to become a founder, I did what I’d done when preparing for any other thing in life. I sat down to research how to become a founder. When brainstorming ideas, I would first search for competitors. When trying to sell to customers, I would…
I’ve been coding entirely with Claude Code for the past two months. At first it was exhilarating. I was speeding through tasks. I was committing like mad. Now, as I’ve built up a fairly substantial app, it’s slowed to a crawl. Ironically, the app I’m building lets me parallelize many instances of Claude Code at once. Often, I’ll have 5 instances running while I’m thinking about new features. The…
I spent the last 30 days vibe coding Swarm . The experience keeps bringing me back to one overriding question about AI coding: how do I build trust in the agent’s outputs? Building trust in the outputs is critical to scaling usage. If I can check out a PR and be sure it’s correct by running a few tests locally, that’s great. If I can see the tests on the PR passed, that’s even better. If I can see…
I spent the last 30 days vibe coding and it’s changed how I think about programming. Programming is clarity of thought and writing. This was always the case but LLMs make it more clear. Once you’ve spent a lot of time exclusively using LLMs to code, they feel more like fancy autocomplete. They initially feel like a miracle. They can output so much code in so little time. Building a basic web app…
Soon we will all be using coding agents. Hundreds of them. The best software engineers will be the best multitaskers. The ones who can architect a great application, split it into parallelizable work and guide a team of agents to build it. Agents reward expertise and clarity of thought. We will still need software engineers. Our jobs will just be different. Companies will use a variety of coding…
1. You get out of it what you put into it I’ve seen engineers say “AI doesn’t work well” and simultaneously be giving Claude Code prompts like “fix this.” If your task description to the agent wouldn’t be good enough for a human engineer, it’s not going to be good enough for an agent. Using agents is work! They can dramatically speed you up but you need to make use of them well. Building an…