Managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time...
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
AI should help us produce better code - Agentic Engineering Patterns
AI should help us produce better code - Agentic Engineering Patterns
What AI coding costs you | Tom Wojcik
What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?
The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering — Bassim Eledath
AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That gap closes in levels — 8 of them. Here's the progression from tab complete to autonomous agent teams.
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.
Agentic coding and persistent returns to expertise
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
The Eternal Sloptember
I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.
Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents? A Controlled Minimal-Pair Study
As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or ``cleanliness'' of the underlying code affect an agent's ability to navigate and modify it? To isolate the effect of code cleanliness from agent capability, we introduce an evaluation protocol built around minimal pairs: repositories that match on architecture, dependencies, and external behaviour, but differ on static-analysis rule violations and cognitive complexity. The pairs are constructed in both directions, by agent pipelines that either degrade a clean repository or clean a messy one. We author 33 tasks across six such pairs, evaluated through hidden tests at the application's public surface. Across 660 trials with Claude Code, code cleanliness does not change the agent's pass rate. However, it substantially alters the agent's operational footprint: agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents. Code cleanliness joins model choice, harness, and prompting as a factor that materially affects agent behaviours.
Managing Agent Skills with Your Package Manager | pavel.pink
AI coding agents use skills — markdown files that teach them domain-specific tasks. We publish ours as conda packages and manage them with pixi, getting versioning, lockfiles, and supply chain security for free.
More Than a Tool
What We Learned from a Year of Conversations About AI
Cursor: AI coding agent
Built to make you extraordinarily productive, Cursor is the best AI coding agent.
How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
On AI and building your own GIS software
Of the thousands of essays over the past two years surrounding AI and its implications are some very thought provoking ones with enormous implications for GIS. Some of the essays are around the the…
